Sand, Sun, and Sotol
by Aurilia
Summary: Sent to retrieve a body from Gallup, NM, Tony and Ziva's charter goes down in a major storm over the desert. Rating for language, not a Tiva fic.
1. A Soundless Flash of White

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** So…I've been neglecting Harry Potter and Supernatural in favor of NCIS lately…I sorta feel kinda dirty. However, I'm having fun, and with luck, I'll be able to get back into my SPN/HP fics during hellatus. Anyway, here's a little fic that popped into my head and wouldn't let me be until I wrote it – I hope y'all enjoy.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_I should've never gotten on that plane. – Chuck Noland, Cast Away_

Silvery waves bounced up off of the patched and pitted tarmac distorting the image of the hangar on the far side of the field almost beyond recognition. An old-fashioned dial thermometer hung cockeyed from the single rusted bolt attaching it to the side of the airfield's control tower. The tower itself was a crazy mishmash of crumbling cement and ancient steel supports. The only indication that the airfield was not one of the innumerable fields abandoned over the course of the past fifty years was the small airplane baking in the sun just outside the hangar doors. If Tony hadn't already been on that side of the field, he would have been tempted to believe that the shiny and obviously well-loved aircraft was nothing more than a mirage brought on by the hundred-twelve degree heat and unrelenting sun.

"Any sign of Miss Cambry?" Ziva asked, descending the stairs from the control room. The metal staircase groaned and creaked in such a way that it would not have surprised either of the two agents if it had decided to finally give up the ghost and come crashing down at that moment.

Tony shook his head. "She's not in the hangar," he replied, using the sleeve of his rather expensive silk shirt to mop rivulets of sweat off his brow. His suit jacket and tie had already been abandoned to his pack as concession to the heat that not even the best air conditioning seemed equipped to handle. "Don't think she'll be gone long, though. Radio was still on in there, and the coffee pot was barely touched." He didn't bother mentioning the fact that someone crazy enough to be drinking coffee in this heat was also likely insane enough not to be at all reliable. _For all we know, she's running naked with the scorpions and lizards._

Ziva glanced at her wristwatch and sighed. Though she was handling the oppressive heat somewhat better than her partner, it had still been quite some time since she'd had to deal with it. And that wasn't even touching on the fact that though she'd grown up with desert heat, the heat of high summer in the farthest corner of West Texas was…different than she was used to. It wasn't a matter of being better or worse, just _different_ in a way that she couldn't quite put her finger on. "If she does not get here soon, you will be the one to tell Gibbs why we are late."

"Hey! Why me? It's not like I'm Cambry's keeper here."

Ziva gave Tony a small half-smile. "Are you not the 'senior field agent'? I would think it is part of your job to pass information such as this along to your superior."

Tony felt as though he were melting from the heat. The thick stench of hot tar in the air didn't help the feeling any, either, as it only served to make him feel nauseous, like his insides were melting as well as his outsides. _I just know I'm gonna wind up with some serious sunburn from this. And if Cambry doesn't appear soon, I'll likely wind up with heatstroke, too._ His brain also felt like it was melting, but Tony wasn't sure if that was a direct result of the heat, the sunbaked stench of tar hovering thickly in the still air, or because he might have had just a little too much fun sampling the hotel's minibar the night before. In this instance, however, it didn't much matter as he was saved from having to come up with a suitable reply to Ziva's comment by the sound of an approaching motor.

A dust-covered pickup truck that had likely rolled off the showroom floor the same year the crumbling control tower had been built materialized through the mirage shimmer and parked at an angle to the hangar. Through the hazy waves of reflected heat, both agents saw two people climb out of the truck. The taller of the two retrieved a backpack from the bed before slinging it over a shoulder and jogging across the pavement to where Tony and Ziva stood in the pitifully inadequate shadow of the control tower.

As the figure came closer, it resolved itself into a man about six inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than Tony, wearing a long-sleeved blue coverall stained with motor oil. The man's face was leather-brown, two shades lighter than his eyes, and his long blue-black hair was pulled into a ponytail. "You're completely insane," Tony said when the man halted his jog at the foot of the steps leading to the control room.

The man smiled broadly, showing off painfully white teeth. "So they tell me. You'd best hurry, though. Little Miss, she don't like bein' kept waitin'. Bad enough she had to come after me." He scurried up the rickety staircase before either of the agents could reply – especially since the humor in the man's tone was enough to tell them he was joking.

Tony sighed and shouldered his own pack from where he'd left it on his first trip across the pavement; Ziva hadn't bothered removing her own since shouldering it on climbing out of their rental SUV. He made a little 'after you' gesture and followed his partner into the sunlight.

There was a moment, roughly halfway between the tower and the battered hangar, where Tony had the unnerving feeling that the heat-shimmer encircling them was actually dissolving the rest of the world, that the only real things remaining were the too-clear and too-sharp bits and pieces visible within that circle of wavering mirage. _Yeah,_ Tony shook his head to clear it, _heatstroke is looking more and more likely._ He forced himself to quicken his pace to catch up with Ziva.

The two of them reached the open hangar doors just as Elizabeth Cambry appeared. She was carrying a medium-sized blue cooler. "Heyla, guys. Was wonderin' when y'all were gonna show."

"We have been waiting on you for the past hour, Miss Cambry," Ziva replied, her tone wasn't _quite_ as chilly as it was when speaking with a suspect, but it was close.

"Wow, a whole hour? Thought y'all said thirteen o'clock," Cambry smiled disarmingly at the Mossad officer.

Checking her watch again, Ziva said, "It is now twelve past fourteen hundred hours, Miss Cambry."

Elizabeth's smile brightened, "Really? Sorry 'bout that – never did understand military time. Anyway, I had to run an' pick up Hok'ee. His car's in the shop, again. Can't take off with no one in the tower – against regs an' all that. I got me enough trouble lately, no sense in addin' the FAA to the list." The rather diminutive brunette stepped easily around Ziva and headed for her plane. Tony couldn't help but feel somewhat jealous that she was showing no sign of noticing the heat. In fact, if he'd been watching her on a television screen, he would have assumed she was on the just-comfortable side of chilly, since she was wearing dark jeans, heavy work boots, a t-shirt under a yellow-and-brown checkered flannel button-down, _and _a denim jacket. A battered brown cowboy hat hung from a cord down her back.

Elizabeth stopped next to the plane and sat her cooler on the cement. She peered up at the sky for a moment, using her hand to shade her eyes, before opening the door to the plane. "NWS has a bunch of thunderstorm watches out 'twixt here an' Gallup, so I ain't gonna say this is gonna be a smooth ride, but I took first in trick-flyin' last five years runnin', so I _will_ say y'all're in good hands." She stopped her rambling when she caught sight of Tony. "_Damn_, amigo – you look like you're about to drop."

Ziva turned her attention from their pilot to her partner and had to agree with the sentiment – DiNozzo's face was bright red, his eyes had a glazed and mildly unfocused look, and his silk shirt was probably to the point where not even the best dry cleaner would be able to salvage it. _Not to mention he's been relatively quiet for far longer than I thought possible_. She felt mildly guilty for not listening earlier that morning when Tony had asked to stop off at a gas station so he could pick up a pair of sunglasses after he'd forgotten his own at the hotel.

For his part, Tony merely licked his lips and shook his head a little. "No…I'm okay."

Elizabeth quirked one eyebrow higher than the other. "The _hell_ you say."

Tony forcibly made himself focus on their pilot's bright blue eyes. "I'm fine, really. Just wasn't expecting it to be this hot here."

The pilot stooped over and fished a bottle of water out of her cooler. Handing it to the man, she said, "Don't chug it – you'll just make yourself sick. If I was you, I'd just rest it on my neck 'til it warmed some, then sip it."

Tony split the advice she gave him – he could see the sense of letting something icy cold help cool him down though the blood flow in his neck, but loathed the thought of getting stuck drinking warm water. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, he alternated holding the water bottle against his jugular and taking small sips from it while Elizabeth stowed their packs and her cooler, and set about checking a few final things on the clipboard she'd retrieved from the cockpit. By the time he and Ziva had climbed aboard the six-seater airplane, he was feeling much more like himself and less like he was slowly melting out of existence.

The first thing Ziva noticed on taking her seat directly behind the pilot was that, unlike nearly every other light aircraft she'd had to ride in previously, this particular plane was not set up with a copilot's area – there were but one set of controls. The second thing she noticed was the fact that though the plane appeared to have a five-passenger capacity from the outside, making for a total of six possible individuals at any given time, the space inside the cabin was much smaller. In addition to the pilot's chair, there were only three other seats.

Elizabeth caught the slightly puzzled expression on Ziva's face and smiled reassuringly. "You been in a Beech Bonanza before, aincha?"

Ziva nodded. "Twice. I recall them being somewhat less…crapped?"

"Think ya mean 'cramped', sweetie," Elizabeth replied, hanging her clipboard on a peg just under the jumble of dials and switches to her right. "An' you're right – most Bonnies do have more room inside, but I got sick of havin' to refuel on taxi-jaunts in the region, so I modded Pippy here to have more in the way of fuel reserves. To do that, though, I had to take out a row of seats."

Before Ziva could reply and address the issue that her name was not 'sweetie', the radio crackled. "Little Miss Lizzie, come back."

Elizabeth chuckled and snatched the receiver off its securing velcro. "Heyla, Hok'ee. You got the flight plan filed?"

"Aoo', Little Miss. All's set and ready. Ran a check with NWS – those T-storm watches are still in effect. The one over White Sands is a bonafide warnin' now." (1)

A flash of worry flickered across the pilot's face. "Alt?"

"It's a ground-creeper. Capping off at five Cs over ground."

Elizabeth's posture relaxed slightly. "Got it, Hok'ee. Shił ahéhee'." (2)

"You're cleared, whenever you're ready."

Elizabeth turned back to face her passengers, "Y'all ready?" The federal agents nodded. Elizabeth was pleased to note that the man was looking healthier by the minute. She smiled and settled her beat-up hat on her head. "Then let's get this show on the road." Into the radio, she said, "Hágoónee', amigo. See ya on the flip." (3)

Hok'ee's voice crackled back with an echoed, "Hágoónee'," and then the pilot started the plane's motor.

Takeoff proceeded as normal, and once she had the plane at cruising altitude, Elizabeth flicked it over to autopilot. She turned most of her attention to the fill-in puzzle book she tended to carry with her wherever she went; the remainder of her attention shifted between monitoring the panel and listening in on the conversation behind her, occasionally tending to the radio when they passed within range of another small airfield.

From the feds' mutterings, she managed to fill in more than just her puzzle. The two agents – she still wasn't all too clear just what agency they worked for – were being sent to retrieve a body related to a case they had apparently been working on for quite some time. Just how they'd wound up in El Paso was anybody's guess, though Lizzie was pretty sure it likely had something to do with the recent problems in Ciudad Juárez._Almost anythin' involvin' feds lately has been connected up with all that. Wish the shit'd die down some. I miss headin' in to Juárez for the weekend – particularly that li'l cantina with that microbrew sotol._She finished one of the puzzles and moved on to a new one.

About two hours into the flight, Lizzie noticed that the chatter from her passengers had died down. She returned her puzzle book to its place in the catch-all that sat in the small bit of floorspace where most planes had a copilot's seat. Stretching as much as the crowded cockpit would allow her, she checked on her guests. The woman was sleeping, that much was obvious from the light snoring that could be heard over the engine. The man was staring out the window.

"Somethin' on your mind, amigo?"

Tony startled slightly and shifted his gaze to the pilot. He shook his head. "Not really. Just hate marking time."

Elizabeth smiled, "Yeah, I know how that can be. Gotta say, though, you look a helluva lot better'an you did when I showed up."

Tony's expression shifted into a slightly rueful grin at his own expense. "Never did like deserts all that much."

Elizabeth laughed lightly, "You're from somewhere they got winter, aincha?"

"Grew up in New York," Tony confirmed. "You?"

"Born'n'bred desert rat," Elizabeth replied. "Grew up in Dell City – that's about an hour east of El Paso. Spent some time up north, though. Ran a tourist charter over the Great Lakes for six months. Couldn't hack it. Too wet, too green, and too freakin' _cold_. I was wearin' sweaters all the time an' felt like I was breathin' through a wet blanket."

"How'd you get into flying?"

The pilot shrugged. "Family thing. Dad, granddad, an' my great-granddad all flew for one reason or another. You always been a fed? 'Cause, if it weren't for the fact I ain't got another charter 'til next week, I wouldn't've pegged you as one."

It was Tony's turn to shrug. "I was a cop for a few years before I joined NCIS."

Elizabeth blinked at him and shook her head. "No shit? You don't seem like a cop."

Taking her statement as a compliment, Tony grinned. "How so?"

"Most cops're assholes, 'less they're still so new at the job the shine ain't rubbed off yet. You're a nice guy, I can tell. Maybe a li'l vain, but you're a nice guy."

Tony started to preen at the 'nice guy' part before his brain caught up with the other half of what she said. "I'm not vain," he insisted.

Elizabeth's left eyebrow crept up towards the brim of her battered hat. "You're wearin' half an Armani suit that costs more'an I bring in in two months of charters; I'm guessin' the jacket's in your ruck. An' your shoes are Italian leather an' your shirt's Moroccan silk. Only peacocks spend that much on what ain't important."

Ziva, who had woken not long after her companions began talking, smiled to herself. _The bird metaphor is rather accurate. Tony seems to have some ruffled feathers right now._

"Hey," DiNozzo protested, "clothes _are_ important!"

Elizabeth chuckled, "Only to keep the sun from bakin' a strip offa your ass, or to keep from bein' arrested. They ain't all that vital –" A shrill beeping noise interrupted her rejoinder, capturing her attention more quickly than Gibbs' piercing whistle could silence the bullpen back at NCIS HQ.

"What is that?" Ziva asked, revealing the fact that she was no longer sleeping.

"NWS alert from Kessel – he's the main weather watch 'tween White Sands and Alamogordo," Elizabeth explained while fiddling with the knobs on her radio. "This is N439TX outta Cambry, come back Kes. Repeat, this is Nico-four-three-niner-Texas outta Cambry. I know y'all're down there, so answer me, Kes."

The reply was broken and full of static. Elizabeth peered out the windows and frowned at the distinctive silvery blue haze on the horizon. "Did not copy, Kes. Repeat."

"…four thunderheads…forming supercell…rotation…moving south by southeast…-peat, four minor storms collided…NWS satellite tracking…-ere rotation…by southwest at thirty knots…"

"Copy, Kes. Rotational supercell forming in flightplan. What's the ceiling and area? Repeat, what's the ceiling and area?" The reply was drowned out by a blaze of static which ended on a shrill squeal. "Damn it, Kes, come back." The radio squawked some more minor static and remained silent. "Kes! Answer me, you sonuvabitch." More staticy silence met her demand.

"Why do I not think this is a good thing?" Tony asked, sotto voice, leaning close to Ziva.

"Because it fuckin' well _ain't_!" Elizabeth shouted, startling both of her passengers with the thinly-veiled panic hiding in her voice. "That damn storm's comin' up faster than thirty fuckin' knots can account for, an' Pippy ain't equipped to go over a fuckin' _supercell_, an' we can't go 'round without knowin' how far this storm's spread!" Moving quickly, Elizabeth rebuckled her seat belt and switched off the autopilot. "Iffen y'all ain't strapped in, you should be. This is gonna get bumpy."

'Bumpy' turned out to be a massive understatement. In what turned out to be the next half-hour of the flight, the only thoughts that really made an impression in Tony's mind were _Thank god McGee's back in D.C._ and _We're gonna die_. The second thought was the loudest, but the first made itself heard well enough – particularly during a maneuver that reminded Tony more of a carnival ride than any prior encounter with air travel – that he'd likely remember thinking it for years to come.

Ziva was as concerned about the situation as her partner, but, unlike Tony, had actually done a little research regarding their pilot for the day. Elizabeth Cambry was an accomplished flier, taking first prize in all competitions she'd entered in during the past five years, and achieving a rank no lower than third place for the four years preceding. Cambry had also been contracted on six separate occasions to perform specific stunts for various Hollywood endeavors. However, all the trick-flying experience in the world was no indication of a pilot's ability to maintain focus in a severe thunderstorm.

The plane itself shuddered, danced, and rocked violently as the noise level grew and the amount of light waned. The amount of cursing coming from the pilot likewise increased until, by the time the plane broached the edge of the storm, she was cussing and cajoling her airplane in equal measure in three languages.

Suddenly, the cabin of the plane went dark.

"Oh, _shit_! Hang on, guys! This is gonna be _bad_!" Elizabeth shouted over the noise of the storm. "And get your hands offa any metal!"

The thick stench of ozone invaded the plane, followed swiftly by the metallic tang of copper. The instrument panel flickered twice before a cascade of sparks and a howl of feedback spurted from the radio.

Then the world exploded in a soundless flash of white.

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**A/N2:** Why is it that I don't seem to get into shows unless they've been around forever?

Anyway, the odd language that pops up from time to time is Navajo – I don't speak it, and to tell the truth, I don't even really know the phonetics of it. I found a few phrases online, and my most sincere apologies if I've managed to mangle it beyond all recognition. Translations are as follows:

1. Aoo' – yes  
2. Shił ahéhee' – I am pleased (literal) / thanks (loose)  
3. Hágoónee' – goodbye

And Hok'ee was found in a list of Native American names, tagged as a Navajo male name meaning 'abandoned', just in case you were interested.

I'll also be using Spanish from time to time. Most of the Spanish usage will be easy stuff (like amigo – friend, and chica – girl), but if I wind up with anything more complicated, I'll be sure to post a translation at the end of the chapter.

Oh, before I forget, 'sotol' is an alcoholic beverage made from the desert plant of the same name – it can be a distilled beverage, much like tequila (another beverage made from a desert plant, though in tequila's case, it's blue agave) or it can be a straight fermentation like beer. Though I've not been into Juárez yet (the problems there are more than enough to keep me firmly north of the US/Mexican border), it is rather popular on the US side of the fence. I've seen more microlabels for it around here than I have for microbrewed beer. It stands to reason that the popularity of the drink would be just as prevalent in Juárez.

I'm also not a pilot (though I love airplanes, I've never even been on one that wasn't a museum piece) and as such I've used both a startling quantity of BS and what I've seen in movies as a reference. Could I have looked the real things up? Sure, but I was feeling lazy. If you really want to comment on what the right things to say or the right protocols would be, go ahead, but I can't promise I'll get around to fixing things.

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	2. How Far from Nowhere

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** It occurs to me that I don't believe I mentioned just _when_ I've set this fic… To be quite honest, I'm not too sure myself, only that it's obviously well after the end of season two and before the end of season six. I don't anticipate many – if any – spoilers, so I think I'll leave it purposefully vague for now.

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**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_We are 100% SNAFU. – Goose, Mad Max_

Elizabeth pried her eyes open and took stock of her situation. After checking in with her body parts, she was pretty sure she wasn't too damaged, though she knew she'd be sporting some Technicolor bruises for the foreseeable future. There weren't any bits screaming 'broken bone here' and nothing was setting off that burning, stinging sensation that usually meant stitches. She wasn't nauseous and what she could see in the flashes of lightning was crisply clear, so she didn't have a concussion. However, she knew from experience that adrenaline had an unhappy tendency to mask severe pain, and the storm had been more than enough to have her on an adrenaline high _before_ the lightning strike.

She started small and wriggled her toes inside her boots. When that caused no sharp sparkles of pain, she slowly worked her way up her legs. After determining that her initial assessment, at least from the hips down, was accurate, she moved on to her arms. Her left elbow hurt, but dully, much like the other times she'd managed to hyperextend it. Gingerly bending and straightening it a couple of times, Lizzie was nearly positive that was all that was wrong with the joint – it didn't hurt bad enough for there to have been any major tears to the ligaments or tendons. Rolling her shoulders let out a pair of snapping noises, but that was par for the course with her as both shoulders had been dislocated several times in the past.

Running her hands over her head, she found that her hat had managed to survive the crash and that she had a small goose-egg on her right temple. She could also feel several small cuts and scrapes, much like the ones on her hands, but nothing that would require anything more than a little Neosporin and a band-aid. She rolled her neck and was rewarded with several pops and snaps; again, the noise was not unusual for her.

_So far, so good._ Elizabeth took a moment to simply sit and listen to the howl of the wind and rain around her. Though she could see brief flashes of her surroundings in the intermittent lightning, she wasn't sure why she wasn't being soaked by the rain. _Think on it later, Liz. You got bigger problems just now._

She took a deep breath and held it for a three-count before letting it out in a relieved woosh. Nothing screamed for her attention, so she didn't even have any busted ribs for a change. She ached a little from where the seatbelt fit, but she felt she could live with that. _Be stiff'n'sore for a week or two, but I think I might've lucked out on this one._

Elizabeth unclipped her harness. She trailed her hands over the shattered instrument panel until she found the hook where her clipboard normally hung. Moving down and to the right of the hook, she quickly located a smallish storage compartment. _Don't let it be jammed_. The latch gave way with minimal force. She grinned. In the jumbled mess inside the compartment, Lizzie quickly located her flashlight.

The strong beam from the 'can-double-as-a-blunt-instrument' Maglite revealed just why the rain wasn't getting in – the plane had skidded to a halt with at least its nose tucked into a rock wall. Unsure if it was a cave on the side of a cliff, a sinkhole opened by the crash, or simply a rocky overhang along a gully, Elizabeth twisted around on her seat. Noting in passing that both of her passengers were still breathing, the pilot peered through the shattered windows and the gaping chasm where the back half of her plane used to be. _Pocket cave,_ she realized. _Maybe fifteen or twenty feet deep, eight or so high, and about twelve or so wide. Wonder if it was sliding in here that tore my wings off or if that happened before we got this far? Know that clump of boulders tore the tail off._

"Okay," she whispered, "I'm pretty sure we're outta imminent danger, so let's check the feds. Dunno what kinda paperwork I'd hafta fill out iffen one died on my watch, an' I ain't about to find out." Since her angle was better for checking the guy first, that's precisely what she did. He had several cuts and scrapes on his head, much like Elizabeth did, but none of them seemed too serious. His eyelids fluttered in the light from her flashlight. "Hey, amigo, you with me?"

Tony knew that the comforting layer of black wasn't where he should be just then, but it took a few seconds for his brain to finish pushing it aside. The first thing he noticed was the loud crash of thunder far too close for comfort. He jerked at the noise before immediately stilling his motion at the sharp spike of pain from his right leg. Squinting in the bright light, he took several deep breaths to keep from shrieking as he resettled himself into his original position.

"Yeah, you're with me," Elizabeth said. "But you ain't all stars an' sunshine. Where ya hurtin'?"

"Just…gimme a minute." Tony let out the breath he'd been holding and forced himself to look. The door of the plane had disappeared at some point in the crash, and its frame had buckled inwards, pinning his right leg to the seat. "Can I see the light?"

Elizabeth shifted to a kneeling position on her chair and leaned over, aiming the flashlight where the fed was looking. She let out a low whistle. "That's gotta hurt like blue fire." Lizzie definitely knew what she was talking about – she'd had a horribly dislocated knee herself once, a souvenir from the second Hollywood crash she ever did.

Tony glared at the brunette. "Ya think?" The jagged edge of the doorframe had also made a pretty impressive gash just above his misplaced kneecap.

Smiling, Elizabeth let the snark slide. "Aside from that, you hurt anywhere else?"

Tony closed his eyes and checked in a manner not wholly unlike the process Lizzie had gone through on waking. He slowly shook his head, "Feel like I been hit by a truck, but I think the knee's the worst of it."

"Sit tight, then. I'm gonna check the chica." Matching words to actions, Elizabeth moved the flashlight to her other passenger.

Much like the crash had crumpled the doorframe inwards, something similar had happened with the window on the female fed's side of the cabin. It didn't take much effort to connect the inward-dented ring of metal with the impressive goose-egg on her head and its sluggishly bleeding split in the skin stretched over it. More worrisome to Elizabeth's way of thinking was the broken stick of creosote that had punched its way through the window hole at some point in the crash and pierced its way through the woman's blouse and into her left bicep.

Tony turned as much as his pinned leg would allow. "Ziva?" He reached over and nudged her. "Hey, Ziva."

The woman came-to with an abruptness that startled Elizabeth almost as much as the murderous look that flashed across the fed's face before she realized where she was. The fed muttered something that Lizzie was positive wasn't repeatable in mixed company, even though she didn't know what language it was. "Ooh, slow down there, chica. You got some greasewood issues we gotta deal with," Lizzie nodded to the stick. "Other than that, and what I'm sure is one helluva headache, you hurt anywhere else?"

Ziva maneuvered so she could reach the knife she carried in her boot. "I do not believe so," she replied through clenched teeth, while using the seven-inch blade to slice her shirt sleeve out of the way.

At a loss to explain the woman's actions, Elizabeth looked over at the other fed. He didn't appear overly concerned. "Once you're done there, Ziva, you think you can get me unpinned from this damn seat?"

"No problem, Tony," Ziva replied, recapturing Elizabeth's attention as she reached up and grasped the long end of the branch that had pierced her arm.

Seeing what the woman was about to do, Lizzie said, "Hey, I don't think you –" The loud crack of the stick, only slightly thicker than an average arrow shaft, interrupted her. "…should do that," she finished as the woman tossed the broken stick out the hole where the window used to be.

"It is just under the skin," Ziva said, directing her comment to Tony. To Elizabeth, she said, "I need light."

Elizabeth repositioned the flashlight beam and Tony was hard-pressed to keep from laughing at the poor girl – mind-numbing pain or no. Her eyes were wide enough that they looked like they were about to fall out of her skull, and they only got wider when Ziva used her blade to cut the end of the branch out of her arm; which was no easy task since she was seeing two of everything. The only indication to either of the observers that it was at all painful was a light hiss of air through her teeth. When the bloody end of the creosote stick was tossed out to join its larger half, Ziva used the scraps of her sleeve to improvise a quick bandage around the wound. When the bandage was tied to Ziva's satisfaction, she finally turned her attention to Tony. A subtle nod in the pilot's direction had her switch her gaze to Elizabeth.

Even through the double-vision, the pilot's face could only be described as 'awestruck'. Until that point, Ziva couldn't have honestly said she'd ever seen that precise expression on anyone's face – at least, not in person. She had imagined it a time or two from books she'd read, and had seen a decent facsimile of it in a movie once, but never before in the flesh. "What?" she had to ask.

Elizabeth blinked twice before a delighted grin spread across her face. "Can I be you when I grow up?"

The question confused Ziva. According to her research on the pilot, Elizabeth Cambry was thirty-two. "Are you not already an adult?"

Ziva's reply sufficiently confused Elizabeth enough to leave her at a loss for words. Luckily, Tony could usually be counted on to fill any silences. "It was a joke, Ziva – I think you've impressed our friend here with your mad Mossad ninja skills."

Only the rush of the storm outside their little safe-haven replied to Tony's comment. Several moments later, Ziva was the first to speak. "You are pinned to the seat?"

Tony nodded. "Part of what used to be the doorframe. It scraped me and dislocated my knee, but otherwise I'm just stuck."

Lizzie moved the flashlight to the problem area being discussed while Ziva unclipped her seatbelt and leaned over to see. The metal was in too awkward of a position for Tony to be of much use in helping to remove it. Ziva quickly ran through several scenarios in her head. "Is there something to…" she started to ask, only to trail off when her vocabulary didn't provide her with the right words. _I hate concussions, they make finding the right words so much harder than it needs to be_. She switched tactics and tried again, "Is there a lever?"

"A lever?" Elizabeth wasn't sure what she meant at first, then it hit her. "Oh! Sorry, sweetie, but I don't carry a pry-bar even when my cargo area's still attached. But, you _did_ just gimme an idea."

With no further warning, the pilot – and her flashlight – swiftly disappeared through the glassless and mangled frame of the former windshield. She reappeared like a jack-in-the-box heartbeats later, standing outside the plane's equally-mangled doorframe. She held the flashlight out to Tony. "Here, you hold this." She peered around Tony and told Ziva, "You push from the inside, and I'll pull from out here. Should be enough so's he can move his leg outta the way. I mean, it ain't like it's steel or nothin', just aluminum, an' only a li'l thicker'an a pop can."

It only took a minute or so for everyone to arrange themselves. "On three," Tony figured that since it was his leg, he'd best be the one counting. "One…two…two-and-a-half…two-and-three-quarters…"

"Oh, for the love of _hell_," Lizzy grumbled, then shouted, "Three!"

The metal screeched and groaned in protest, but managed to move enough that Tony could pull his leg out of harm's way. Elizabeth and Ziva let go and the frame snapped back with a bang.

Tony, still seeing stars from moving his leg, let out a few breaths and then asked, "Okay. Now what?" _It just _had_ to be the same leg I broke in college, huh?_

Ziva moved herself into the pilot's seat and Lizzie leaned against the plane. "Well, next thing I'd do is see iffen we can't get your kneecap back to where it's s'posed to be."

"You ever do that before? Relocate a knee, I mean?" Tony asked.

Elizabeth shrugged. "Sorta."

Tony opened his eye and aimed the flashlight in Elizabeth's face. "What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Just that I've done it on myself a coupla times, but not on anyone else." Seeing Tony's raised eyebrows, she elaborated, "After the first time I dislocated my shoulder, I heard the EMT say it's best to get joints back in place as soon as possible, else it might not go back without surgery, 'cause of the swelling an' all."

Tony grimaced, though neither Ziva nor Lizzie knew if it was at the thought of surgery, in sympathy for Elizabeth's statement, or at the imminent prospect of a painful application of first-aid. "First time?" Tony stalled for time. "You get injured that much?"

Lizzie let out a chuckle, "Honey, I'm a stunt-pilot. I've had more concussions, broken bones, dislocations, and stitches than I can _count_. Hellfire, this marks my _forty-eighth_ crash – though all the rest, save one, were on purpose."

"This is not helping his leg," Ziva interrupted.

Tony groaned. "Thank you, Zee-vah."

Realizing that the man had been stalling the inevitable, Elizabeth smirked. "Yeah, this ain't doin' what needs done, Áłtsé Hashké." (1)

When all was said and done, it wasn't quite as bad as Tony had feared. Yes, the actual act of manipulating his patella back into its normal groove was the single most-painful moment of his entire life, but once it was done, the pain almost totally evaporated. It still throbbed and sent little lances of stabbity pain through his leg if he moved it too much, but it was a far cry better than the white-hot agony it had been before.

While they were concentrating on Tony's knee, two things of note happened. Firstly, the storm finally moved on. With the absence of clouds and the general wet conditions, the temperature swiftly plummeted. Weeks later, Tony looked up the official nighttime low for that night and found it nearly impossible to believe that it had been eighty-three degrees. However, a thirty-degree drop from any daytime high makes it seem much colder than it might actually be; rather like how a stiff breeze on a cool day can make it feel much colder than the thermometer says it is.

Secondly, Lizzie noticed that Ziva's pupils weren't the same size. Knowing how she felt about admitting to little things like head injuries herself, Elizabeth opted not to say anything. She simply made a mental note to set the alarm on her wristwatch to sound in two-hour increments if the other woman decided to sleep.

With all the necessary first-aid out of the way, it was time to take stock. The first thing they checked was the radio after Lizzie had climbed back into the plane and Ziva returned to her seat. Unfortunately, not only was the CB fried from the lightning, but the mic had managed to disappear during the course of the crash.

"Don't you have an emergency location beacon?" Tony asked after Lizzie got done cursing at the broken radio.

Elizabeth nodded. "Yeah, I do. It's in my toolbox."

A smile started to surface on DiNozzo's face. "Great! Then we don't need the radio. Just turn it on or whatever, and someone will figure out where we are."

"Just one small, nearly insignificant li'l problem with that, Áłtsé Hashké."

"What is the problem?" Ziva asked.

"Well, the toolbox, the first-aid kit, your packs, and my cooler are god-only-knows how many fuckin' miles _thataway_!" She flung her hand in the direction of the great gaping hole where the tail end of the plane had broken away – just a few inches behind where the agents' seats were bolted down. Elizabeth forced herself to calm down a little. "Look," she glanced at her watch, "it's comin' up on midnight already, so they know we're missin'. When they don't get a signal from the emergency beacon, they'll start lookin' come dawn. How 'bout you two get some sleep? I'll keep an eye out for any critters what might be lurkin' an' see iffen I can't get somethin' burnin' so's they know we're here."

After having seen Elizabeth – who was a good four inches shorter than Ziva – shatter what little remained unbroken in the control panel with one swift kick when the radio wouldn't work, neither of the agents felt they had a good enough of an excuse to pass muster with the pilot. So they didn't even try. Instead, Ziva lent a hand in helping Tony out of the remains of the airplane so he could stretch out on the floor of the small cave. While the agents did that, Elizabeth managed to find that her catch-all had gotten caught up in the small hollow under her chair. _Well, that's one less thing to worry about_. If the canvas bag had been any smaller, it would have been deemed a purse – any bigger and it would qualify as an actual backpack or messenger-bag. Terminology aside, however, it contained not just Lizzie's puzzle book, but also her maps of the region and the surveyor's compass that once belonged to her mom's father. _At least I'll be able to figure out just how far from nowhere we are come sunup._

With an 'it figures' sigh, Tony stretched out on the dirt floor of the cave with no regard for his formerly-expensive suit and silk shirt. Ziva picked a similar spot of cave floor a few feet away. While Ziva quickly began snoring, Tony watched as the pilot climbed out of the wreck one more time. She stood close to where the nose of the plane used to sport a propeller and reached out. With her palm flat on the crumpled metal, Tony heard her whisper, "Vaya con Dios, mi corazón. You served me well." (2)

Figuring that Elizabeth's relationship with her plane was probably at least as important to her as his own relationship with his car, Tony didn't say anything until she'd turned and began making her way to the mouth of the cave. "You wind up needing sleep yourself –"

"Don't worry. Iffen I can't make it 'til daylight, I'll wake y'all. Get some sleep, Áłtsé Hashké." Lizzie smiled at him. She stopped at the mouth of the cave and stared out at the night. From the concern in his voice at that last interrupted comment, Elizabeth was convinced that her earlier assessment of Tony's character was accurate. _He really is an Áłtsé Hashké, isn't he?_

* * *

**A/N2:** Just why Lizzie is calling Tony 'Áłtsé Hashké' will be addressed later in the story, so please hold all questions on that until later. Thanks in advance!

1. Áłtsé Hashké – Coyote (Navajo)  
2. Vaya con Dios, mi corazón. – Go with god, my heart. (Spanish)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	3. Excalibur

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** I know next to nothing about Israel, so any time Ziva mentions anything along those lines, it has a high probability of being wrong and as such should be viewed as poetic license on my part. If you know more than I do and see any glaring errors, feel free to let me know – but, like with the plane thing in previous chapters, I can't guarantee I'll ever get around to fixing it in-story (but the knowledge will come in handy for future reference).

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Ninety-seven percent nationwide service and we get stuck in the three percent. – Doug Bukowski, The Hills Have Eyes__ (remake)_

The smell of smoke was what pulled Ziva out of sleep – at least, it was what caused her to decide that it was time to get up. A highly irritating beeping noise kept waking her all night, usually just as she was entering dreams, but as much as she would have liked to angry about it, she had seen the sense behind it. Slowly, she pushed herself into a sitting position. She was still stiff and sore, but her vision was back to where it ought to be, and the headache was slowly fading.

Ziva climbed to her feet and made her way to the entrance of the cave. Elizabeth was sitting on a smallish boulder to the left of the cave, studying a map and alternating between scribbling in a memo book and using the calculator in her watch. An obviously expensive compass rested on the dusty ground at her feet. The source of the smoky scent that had woken her was a small campfire about ten feet directly in front of the cave entrance.

The path of the crash was painfully clear in the light of day. Scraps of torn metal and other not-as-easily-identifiable litter stretched in a straight line from the mouth of the cave into the distance, tracing a line that neatly bisected the long, narrow valley in which the cave was located. There weren't any roads that Ziva could see – and since the valley itself was on a gentle upslope to the cave, she could see a _long_ ways – nor were there any power lines or radio towers immediately visible. But it was the absence of _sound_ that really brought home the fact that they were well and truly isolated. It wasn't quiet by any means; there were innumerable birds chirping nearby, a cricket sang its own song from under a rock somewhere off to the left, and the low hum of wind through the shrubby plant life underscored everything, but there wasn't so much as a whisper of motor-noise or other people-based sound.

The valley itself was maybe a half-mile wide and longer than she could see from her vantage point. The ground was a dusty beige color and had rocks in sunwashed shades of yellow, orange, and tan poking up at random intervals. The plants were mostly either tall bushes or very small trees with blue-green leaves on roughly half of them. The rest of the plants were a roughly equal split between some sort of crazy cactus that looked like a child had glued them together and were covered in small, reddish-purple growths, plants that looked like bigger versions of the tops of fresh pineapple, and plants that looked remarkably like a giant had gone around and planted a bunch of feather-dusters in the desert floor.

The irritating beeping noise sounded again, and Ziva tore her gaze from the surroundings. She saw Elizabeth let out a silent sigh and look at her watch. The pilot started to stand, but stopped and quickly hit a button on her watch to silence the alarm when she saw Ziva standing in front of the cave. "Oh, you're up. That's good."

Ziva stood in silence for a moment, meeting the nearly white-blue eyes of a woman she was rapidly beginning to realize was far more complicated a person than she'd originally assumed. "I am," Ziva said. The corners of Lizzie's mouth twitched upwards in the most infinitesimal of smiles as a silent understanding passed between the two. "What are you doing?" Ziva asked, stepping over to Elizabeth's stone seat.

Elizabeth shifted her position on the rock as Ziva knelt next to her. She spread the topographical map of the region over their knees and ran a finger over a light pencil mark. "This was our original flight plan," she explained. "Here's where the storm was," she indicated the general area of White Sands, New Mexico. "If Kes had been right about the storm's windspeed and direction, we shoulda gone down around here." The place on the map where she pointed was dotted with a town by the name of Tularosa.

"There is a town here?"

Elizabeth shook her head and chuckled. "There may be a helluva lotta small towns down here what don't look like more'an a single homestead or a lonesome roadhouse, but ain't no way in _hell_ we're anywhere _near_ Tularosa – it's bigger'an that, not to mention there ain't any valleys like this 'round there. No, I said 'shoulda'. Now, this means one of two things – either Kes was wrong, or that storm last night was a rarer bird than most. Personally, I think it's the latter. Kes's been doin' his job since 'fore my dad got his wings, an' he's damn good at what he does."

"If that is the case, then where do you think we are? And how was the storm different?"

"Well, to answer the second question first, I think we hit on a storm that was spinnin' one way at ground-level, and the opposite direction up higher. Ain't but maybe once ev'ry ten years or so that we manage a supercell over this part of the country – conditions ain't right for 'em, most of the time. We do get some hellacious thunderstorms, don't get me wrong, particularly durin' monsoon season, but never anythin' _real_ major. But since we definitely _ain't_ in Tularosa right now, it's the only thing what makes sense – we come inta a storm twistin' one way up top an' the other way below – a storm like what I've described happens 'round here maybe once every century. Hell, it even explains how come the turbulence was so bad: we was ridin' the dividin' line 'twixt the upper and lower rotations. Iffen I'd thought ta take her up another hundred feet, or down the same, we likely wouldn't've crashed…" Elizabeth fell silent and glanced past Ziva at the line of wreckage stretching down from the cave. It was obvious that the pilot was blaming herself for the crash. "Iffen I'd've just stopped to fuckin' _think _for a half-second last night…" Lizzie's quietly muttered admonishment to herself trailed off.

"I do not know about here, but in Israel the pilots have a saying," Ziva said.

Before she could say more, however, Elizabeth's eyes flicked back to Ziva and her small smile reappeared. "Lemme guess – 'Any landin' you can walk away from is a good'un'."

Ziva allowed herself to look a little surprised, "You have met Israeli pilots before?"

Lizzie shook her head, "Nope, but that sentiment's pretty universal. Ain't met a pilot yet what didn't have one version or another of it runnin' through their heads, no matter where they was from." With a slight broadening of her small smile, Elizabeth returned her attention to the map. "As to just where the hell we wound up…well…I just ain't too sure on that. Since I don't know how fast the upper portion of that storm was rotatin', I can't figure things all that exact. I know we're on the eastern side of the San Andres, but I ain't positive on just _where_, yet."

* * *

Tony woke to the sound of faint singing. _I know that song, don't I?_ He could hear some of the melody, but couldn't quite make out the words. He knew it wasn't Ziva singing, though; the voice had a bit too much gravel in it for it to be his teammate. _Or dust,_ he corrected, _it's not like there isn't enough of it blowing around out here, and she did say she grew up in the area._

Stretching as much as his bruises would allow, Tony pushed himself into a sitting position. From the brightness outside the cave mouth, he could tell he'd been asleep longer than he'd intended and a quick glance at his watch confirmed the fact that it was coming up on noon. He scrubbed a hand across his face and wished for a hot shower and his toothbrush before deciding that both of those wants were really secondary to taking a look at his leg in the harsh light of day.

Sleeping on the stone floor of the cave, however, had led to a couple of pinched nerves. As a result, the lower half of his right arm, in addition to his injured leg, were apparently off on a quick trip to Key West. _So not looking forward to them coming back, either. Always did hate that pins-and-needles feeling._ The song from outside wormed its way into his brain and he found himself humming along to the melody as he pulled himself close to the cave wall. _La, la, la-la, la-la, la, la-la, la, la, la… After two days in the desert sun, my skin began to turn red. After three days something-something about a river bed… Damn it, what the hell is the name of that and why do I know it?_

Tony managed to pull himself into a standing position using the wall as a crutch of sorts. All the moving he was doing had managed to wake his arm up, and his leg wasn't far behind – it had the distinctly tingly sensation that preceded the pins-and-needles feeling that he so loathed. _Okay, DiNozzo – it's about ten feet to the door – is it called a door when it's a cave? Doesn't matter. It's only ten feet. You can do this._

Gingerly, he lowered his foot to the cave floor while still leaning heavily on the curve of stone that arched up and over to form the rest of the pocket in the rock wall. _So far, so good. Come on, then. Shift some weight over and take a step._ He matched his actions to his thoughts and barely had time to register that the weird strangled noise he heard had come from his own mouth before finding himself in a rumpled heap on the cave floor. He took several deep breaths through clenched teeth. _Damn! How can it hurt _more_ than when I broke it? Worst pain _ever_. _

Since his eyes were screwed tightly shut, he didn't see Elizabeth enter, somewhat alarmed at the pain-laced noise she'd heard. "Áłtsé Hashké?"

Tony pried his eyes open and tried to manipulate his grimace into his normal flashy grin with limited success. "Hey."

"Hey yourself. Lemme guess – you tried standin' an' found out the hard way that it ain't quite so easy as ya remember?"

Tony snorted. "You could say that."

Lizzie smiled that slow, small smile of hers and held out a hand. "Come on, then."

DiNozzo looked from her offered hand to her face, skepticism easily readable in his expression. "Uh…"

She chuckled. "I'm stronger than I look, amigo. I ain't gonna say it'll be easy, 'specially since you got a good ten inches on me, but it'll be better than tryin' it solo."

"Where's Ziva?" Tony asked. He would much rather lean on someone who he _knew_ was stronger than she looked than take the word of someone he'd only just met the day before.

"She's out scavengin' the back-trail of the crash, seein' iffen there ain't somethin' what survived that'll make life a li'l easier on us." Lizzie had yet to put her hand down. "Said she'd be back by one."

With no other options, Tony sighed a little and took Elizabeth's hand. Her assertion that she was stronger than she looked was proven as she pulled him to his feet before he could blink. She wrapped his right arm around her shoulders. "Okay, lean on me, an' we'll getcha outside."

Tony concentrated on moving forwards, trusting most of his balance to the petite pilot who he was beginning to think could out-stubborn Gibbs. It took nearly a full five minutes to make it into the sunshine. Once there, Tony simply took a moment to stare at his surroundings. _It's like being on a different planet,_ he thought. _Either that, or like I got sucked into _3:10 to Yuma_._

Not much about the valley had changed since Ziva had surveyed it earlier that morning, though the chill in the air had long since burned off. There was also a large collection of stones marking a large 'X' on a relatively clear patch of ground about three hundred yards from the entrance of the cave.

"What's that?" Tony asked, pointing to the stone letter; years of experience in measuring and sketching crime scenes had him pegging it at about fifteen feet wide and roughly fifty feet long.

"Ground-to-air emergency code," Elizabeth explained. "The 'X' means that we need medical assistance. Iffen someone don't show by sundown, I figure we'll see about hikin' east – eventually, we'll run inta either a town or US 54. Iffen it comes to that, I'll rearrange the rocks into an arrow that'll point the way we went." She tugged on Tony's shoulder. "Come on, Áłtsé Hashké."

Instead of leading him to the ring of stone encircling a campfire that oddly had him thinking of barbecue, Elizabeth led him to and around a small jut of rock in the cliff wall. He shot her a puzzled look.

She shrugged and her ever-present smirk brightened. "Figured ya had to piss by now. Gimme a shout when you're done." She disappeared around the protrusion of dusty yellow stone before he could protest.

He sighed in defeat and realized she'd been right. _Yeah. Could definitely out-stubborn Gibbs._

* * *

Ziva was having marginal luck in finding useful things among the scattered wreckage from the plane. She'd managed to locate the shattered remains of Elizabeth's blue cooler; a half-dozen bottles of water had managed to survive, as had a lone sandwich in a zippered baggie. She had also managed to locate Tony's backpack. Though she was grateful for the water and slightly dubious about the sandwich's continued edibility this long without refrigeration, finding Tony's pack was frustratingly irritating.

It had been caught by the loop at the top in the branches of a tall shrub/small tree covered in wicked-looking thorns. The pack itself had come through the crash much like DiNozzo himself – a little battered, a little scuffed, but none the worse for wear.

Numerous scraps of canvas, a couple of shreds of rapidly-drying-but-still-soggy paper, and plastic shards she recognized as being from her cell phone all indicated that her own pack had been a casualty of the crash. _Must even his backpack be infernally lucky?!_

However, as irritated as she was at the loss of her change of clothes and the spare clips for her Sig, she was happy she'd found at least _one_ of their backpacks. With the gash in her arm, trying to manage the few provisions she'd been able to locate would have been a nightmare otherwise.

Checking her watch, she found that it was coming up on half-past-noon. She turned around and saw two small figures sitting on the slope in front of the cave, next to the thin ribbon of bluish smoke coming from the campfire. _Time to head back. Perhaps Miss Cambry has managed to narrow down our position by now._

By the time she managed to make it back to the cave, she was nearly ready to ignore her misgivings about the sandwich. She'd last eaten more than twenty-four hours prior and though she could go a long while without food, she really didn't like having to. Therefore, the smell of roasting meat surprised her.

As she approached her companions, she began to hear their conversation. "…creosote an' mesquite bark –"

"_That's_ why it smells like barbecue!" Tony punctuated his exclamation with a snap of his fingers.

Lizzie laughed, "Yeah. That's why the smoke smells like a barbecue. It was either burn mesquite or sage, an' I _hate_ the smell of burnin' sage. But like I was sayin', the mesquite an' creosote bark are mixed up with some mashed peyote. The combo is enough to make Neosporin look like child's play."

"Hang on a minute, _peyote_?" Tony sounded…well, _shocked_. Ziva hadn't thought that much could shock her partner. "You put _peyote_ on it?" The question had distinctive tones of panic laced through it.

"It's only a hallucinogen when swallowed, Áłtsé Hashké! Otherwise, it's like creosote an' mesquite!" Elizabeth rushed to finish her explanation before Tony could completely freak out. "All three are pretty powerful at stoppin' germs in their tracks. Creosote an' mesquite are both antifungal, antimicrobial, astringent, antiseptic, and antispasmodic with mild painkillin' properties. And I might get in trouble later for it, but peyote ain't just for vision-quests! Hellfire, there was an article in some medical journal or other a few months back where extracts from peyote were shown to be effective against penicillian-resistant bacteria."

Ziva stepped out from behind a clump of shrubby trees that weren't much taller than she was in time to see the amusingly scandalized expression on Tony's face. He opened his mouth to say something that Ziva was positive would only wind up insulting Cambry, and so she stepped up her pace. "I managed to find your pack, Tony," she started off nearly shouting, but was close enough to them by the end of the sentence to revert to a normal speaking volume. "I also found what was left of your ice-box, but it was not useable. There are some bottles of water, though, and I found this." She tossed the ziplock containing the sandwich to Elizabeth.

Lizzie caught the bag on reflex and glanced at it before letting out a gleeful, "My sandwich! Yay!"

Ziva handed the backpack to her partner before taking a seat on one of the sun-warmed rocks near the fire. She noticed that the source of the roasting meat smell was a snake of some sort set up on a hastily-assembled spit constructed of scavenged airplane parts. All in all, Ziva didn't mind much – snake could be quite good, even if it wasn't a survival situation.

It was obvious, however, that Tony wasn't as interested in eating snake. He was eyeing Elizabeth's sandwich with intense interest. His attention didn't escape Lizzie's notice. She pulled the sandwich out of the baggie and grinned at him. "Peanut butter, pepperoni, bananas, and sweet relish. Did y'all want some?"

Tony swallowed hard against the gagging sensation in the back of his throat. "Nah," he said, shaking his head. _I'd rather take my chances with that snake you beaned with the rock._ "Thanks, though." He dug into his backpack and pulled out his jacket. He checked first one pocket and then the other before remembering that he'd tucked the object he was after in the inner pocket. "Ah-hah!"

"What?" Elizabeth asked around a mouthful of goo.

"Knew I had it here somewhere," Tony said, holding up his phone like it was Excalibur.

Lizzie just shook her head sadly while he opened it.

"Damn it!" It took all of his willpower not to throw the gadget against the cliff wall.

"No signal?" Ziva asked.

Tony shook his head. "No signal," he confirmed.

* * *

**A/N2:** Oh, I should probably mention that I'm also in no way affiliated with the band America – though I've been suffering from Tony's earworm for going on three freakin' _weeks_ now (just so you know, it's _A Horse With No Name_).

And the intel on mesquite, creosote, and peyote is as accurate as the interwebz where I found the information.

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please. Also – I didn't completely write this out ahead of time (just outlined it) and I'm waffling back and forth on whether or not I want to attempt Gibbs' character just yet (personally, I find him more inscrutable than Ziva). So…What do y'all think? Do you wanna see a little Gibbs in the next chapter?


	4. Feeling Useless

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** In working my way through all the episodes of NCIS currently available online (links to all the NCIS eps are available through triple-W (dot) surfthechannel (dot) com (slash) show (slash) 151 (dot) html, doing as normal for ffnet's weirdo linking limitations – and the two eps of JAG that started it all can be found at megavideo), I noticed something that made Gibbs a touch easier for me to understand: In the episode _Reveille_ (1.23), the ep started out with a nightmare that, when viewed with a total understanding of the major events that happen later in the series, reveals itself to be a powerful bit of precog (during the course of the nightmare, Gibbs sees Kate in a body-bag with a bullet hole neatly centered in her forehead). So, Gibbs isn't _quite_ as puzzling to me as I'd previously believed – he's simply a very repressed psychic (who happened to be, once upon a time, a Marine – though that part is still a little hard for me to understand, 'cause I never did get the whole military-mindset thing). Yes, this means I went ahead and wrote Gibbs into the story.

This chapter rewinds the timeline a little, just to let y'all know.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_You're the trainee, man. Shit rolls downhill. – Bart, Dawn of the Dead (remake)_

"McGee!"

Tim's head snapped up from his computer. "Yeah, boss?"

"You find me that money, yet?"

McGee swallowed at the scowl on Gibbs' face. _How is it that he can still make me fear for my job, even after all this time?_ "Partially," he replied. "The whole ten million was transferred to a bank in the Caymans, and then split. Four million stayed there, and the remaining six bounced through Beijing, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Mexico City –"

"Where is it _now_, McGee?"

It was days like this that Tim really hated his job. "That's just it, boss, it's –"

"Do _not_ tell me you lost it!"

"I didn't lose it!" McGee protested. "It's just that, well, it's not really _anywhere_." He hit a few keys and nodded towards the plasma screen. "Look."

A map of the world was outlined in blue on a black background. A small red dot blinked slowly in the Cayman Islands while a second small red dot seemed to wander aimlessly over the surface of the map. Tim got up from his seat and walked around his desk to stand next to Gibbs. He pointed to the Cayman dot, "That's the four million," and then pointed to the wandering dot, "and that's the six. It starts to get routed to a new location, and then gets re-directed to another location before the transfer is complete, so it's simply bouncing around in cyberspace."

A new voice spoke up from behind them, "It's playing _The Floor is Lava_. Cool!"

"What?" Gibbs said, turning to face Abby.

"You know, when you're a kid and you pretend the floor is made of lava and you go climbing over the furniture to get from place to place without touching it?" Gibbs blinked at her. She shrugged a little and started over. "Hey, Gibbs. I'm disappointed – you didn't come down to see me when I finished up with Hinton's computer," Abby mock-pouted.

"Tell me when it's stopped climbing over the furniture," Gibbs told McGee with a hint of dry irony in his voice before asking Abby, "So, what did you find on Hinton's computer?"

"Not a whole lot," Abby replied. "He liked playing poker online, but none of the sites that require money; apparently, he only played for fun. He also has _no_ porn – I can't remember the last time I checked a computer and found _no _porn. There are some pictures saved on it – and before you ask, I've already checked most of them, and so far they've all checked out as family members; this guy had _no_ social life _at all_," Abby's tone and body language clearly communicated her incredulity over this concept. "Other than that, though, the only other thing I could find was that he's got a freaky-high score on Minesweeper."

Tim couldn't help but ask, "How good?"

"Fourteen seconds," Abby replied, her earlier incredulity momentarily supplanted by an energetic awe.

"That's it?" McGee scoffed, smirking a little. "My best time is twelve."

"On _expert_," she clarified.

"Abby!" Gibbs derailed the side-conversation. "Anything that can tell us what we need to know?"

Abby shook her head. "Sorry, bossman. Hinton used his computer even _less_ than you do. I mean, there's absolutely _nothing_ on it. No hidden files, no encrypted files, and all the files he _does_ have are exactly the size they're supposed to be."

The ringing of Gibbs' desk phone interrupted any further discussion. "Go over it again, Abs," he ordered before snatching the receiver off the cradle. "Gibbs," he barked into the phone while watching as Abby and McGee traded 'I hate it when he's like this, don't you?' looks.

"Agent Gibbs, this is Officer Daniels in Gallup," the voice on the other end of the line sounded competent – tired, but competent. "I was calling to let you know that I was just contacted by Hok'ee Whitetail from Cambry Airfield." Gibbs made a shooing motion towards Abby while the officer spoke. "Your agents were delayed on takeoff, so they won't be getting in until nine this evening… Um, that'd be eleven your time, I suppose." Abby and McGee traded another quick look before she headed towards the elevator. "I already let the transport down here know."

"What delayed them?" Gibbs asked.

The officer on the other end of the line sighed. "Honestly? I don't know. Other than watching Liz Cambry at the last air-show in Santa Fe, I've never dealt with her operation before, and Whitetail never said."

"Have my agents call when they show," Gibbs said before hanging up. He ignored the curious sidelong glance from McGee and checked the time – 1712. He mentally sighed. _Why can't things ever go as planned?_ Picking up his coffee cup, he found that it was empty. He tossed it in the wastebasket and stood. "I'm going –"

"For coffee," McGee finished his comment without looking up. "Call you if the money finally parks itself somewhere."

Gibbs let a small smile tug at the corners of his mouth as he headed for the elevator, grateful yet again that his team was finally back where it belonged, instead of being scattered to the four winds.

As he made his way from the Naval Yard to 'his' coffee shop, he mulled over the case they were working on. An anonymous tip had surfaced about a month earlier that something was being planned involving the Comptroller's office at the Pentagon. Considering the last time Gibbs' team had been involved with that particular office it had been when Commander Watson had used the kidnapping of his own family to cover up the theft of two million dollars, Gibbs hadn't been particularly thrilled at the prospect of something _else_ going on there. When he informed his team of the tip, DiNozzo had commented that the Pentagon needed more stringent hiring policies. The comment had earned some odd looks from both McGee and David – neither of whom had been on the team during the Watson case – and a nod of agreement from Gibbs.

While working more-pressing cases, the MCRT kept as much of an eye on things as they could, helped along by several more anonymous tips. They'd attempted to track down their source, only to be led to one abandoned burn-phone after another, all registered under the moniker of 'Annie Onimus'. And then, three days earlier, one last call had been routed through to Gibbs' desk.

Unlike the other calls, this one had not been made from a cell. Instead, it came through as a collect call from 'Annie Onimus'. Though the name was female, the voice on the other end had been male, the synthesizer used in previous calls abandoned. The caller had also sounded scared and pressed for time. He told Gibbs that they were dealing with a heist, and that all the details could be found in his computer, which had been stashed in a locker at the Amtrak station in D.C. The last thing the caller had said was, "Hurry. Suzy scares the shit outta me, and I don't think Max can keep her under control much longer." Before the call could disconnect, however, Gibbs overheard the sound of a door slamming open and a woman yelling at 'Joshie' before a gunshot rang out. A couple of seconds later, the call was disconnected.

McGee had traced the call to room 253 of the Best Western in Gallup, New Mexico. Further digging had found the room had been rented by Joshua Hinton and that the 'Suzy' he had mentioned was likely Lieutenant Susanna Brussman, the Comptroller's current personal assistant, and 'Max' was likely Maxwell Arnette, a janitor in that portion of the Pentagon. When they'd gone to bring both employees in for questioning, neither could be located. They were on vacation, according to the Pentagon, and not due back for a full two weeks.

The team had easily located Joshua's computer, right where he said it would be, but in two full days of exhaustive searching, neither Abby nor McGee had been able to find anything at all on it. During the intervening two days, Gibbs had sent Tony and Ziva out to Gallup to retrieve Hinton's body from the local LEOs and any evidence that might have been collected in the hotel room, hoping that something might help clear up just what the _hell_ was going on.

That morning, a call had come in that filled in some of the blanks – ten million dollars had gone missing from assorted accounts under the Comptroller's control. Gibbs _knew_ who was responsible for it, but they had no hard evidence linking Lieutenant Brussman and Arnette to the theft. So, he'd put McGee on tracing the cash while Abby tore through Hinton's computer.

That there was nothing at all on it frustrated Gibbs to no end, and that frustration showed in his tone when he ordered his coffee – the barista, someone he'd not seen working before and so had to be new, nearly jumped out of her skin to fill it quickly. _Hinton said all the information we needed was in the damn computer, but Abby can't find anything on it…_ Gibbs paused and ran the thought back through his head. _Could he have meant it literally?_ He handed the coffee-girl a five and told her to keep the change as he snagged the white cup with one hand and pulled out his cell with his other. He hit the speed-dial for Abby's lab while hurrying back to the Yard.

She answered on the second ring. "Abby radio, you're on the air!"

"Hey, Abs," Gibbs said, heading for the stop'n'rob just outside the gates to the Naval Yard. If he was right, then Abby would need a refill. "Got a question for you."

"Shoot, bossman."

"Is it possible to hide something inside a computer? Not a file, but an actual _physical_ something inside the _physical_ computer itself?" The door to the convenience store dinged loudly and the clerk waved at him as he headed for the Caf-Pow fountain in the corner.

"If it was small enough, yeah. Why?"

"Because Hinton said that the info was _in_ the computer, not _on_ it. Check it out."

"Will do."

Gibbs disconnected the call and finished collecting Abby's drink. By the time he returned to HQ and strode into the forensic scientist's lab, Abby was busy scanning through information on her computer, bopping her head to the beat of heavy bass from her stereo. Hinton's laptop sat upside-down on the table behind her, the cover for the battery compartment lying at an angle across the case, and the thick black bar battery – with a scrap of scotch tape clinging to it – sat next to the computer.

When a full glass of her favorite fruity-flavored caffeinated beverage appeared in her line-of-sight, she stopped typing long enough to seize the glass. Abby took a quick pull through the straw and grabbed her remote to turn down the music. "There was an SD card hidden in the battery compartment. I haven't had much time to look through it yet, but it looks like Hinton kept a record of _everything_ – there's text files, videos, photos."

"How long to go through it all?"

"Six or seven hours." At Gibbs' look, she defended her estimation with, "Hey! There's a _lot_ to go through, Gibbs."

"I'll send McGee down to help." He turned to head back to his desk. _While they're doing this, I may as well see if I can find what delayed DiNozzo and David._

Abby watched as Gibbs left her to her computers. She returned the music's volume to its previous level. "Something's bugging him," she whispered to herself, the sound inaudible over the noise from her stereo. She chewed on her lip a little, wondering just what it might be, before sighing and returning to scanning through the files on the SD card.

About five minutes later, the image on her plasma screen changed to show a map of the world with a couple of tracking dots. Less than a minute later, Tim strolled into her lab. "Hey, Abby. Gibbs sent me down, said you needed a hand?"

Abby nodded, "Yeah. Almost four gigs of text, photos, and video to sort through." She indicated the map on the wall, "I assume we're also supposed to keep an eye on the money, too?"

Tim echoed Abby's nod. "Uh-huh," he said, pulling one of the lab stools over next to Abby. "I'll take the text docs, if you want."

"Sure," she exited out of one window on the computer and pulled up a new one. "And I'll start in on the video."

After transferring the appropriate files to the system McGee was on, the pair worked in companionable quiet for almost a half an hour. "Is it just me," Tim broke the silence, "or does Gibbs," he paused and shot a quick glance over his shoulder to double-check that the man being discussed wasn't actually there, "seem more snappish than usual today?"

"It's not just you," Abby replied. "He remembered my Caf-Pow, but he definitely seemed distracted when he stopped by."

Back in the bullpen, Gibbs was flipping through the small amount of information they had on the case though his mind was elsewhere. He'd gotten through to the tower controller for Cambry Airfield and had been reassured that the late takeoff was the Airfield's fault – actually, Whitetail had admitted the fault was his own, as the pilot had needed to pick him up when his car failed to start that morning.

Realizing he'd just read the same paragraph three times without it making an impression, Gibbs tossed the pile of papers aside and removed his glasses. It was 1800 – six o'clock in the evening. Usually, this was about the time he normally told everyone to go home and get some sleep, unless they were working on a particularly intense case, but today wasn't really a _normal_ day. Besides, he really did need whatever information was on that memory-card, and it wasn't like he could just go home when Abby and McGee had to stick around and work. Well, he _could_, but he didn't want to. The downside was that there wasn't anything for him to really do at the moment – and he hated feeling useless.

Downing the last of the coffee in his cup, he tossed it in the trash where it made a hollow, rattling noise against the other empty cups in the bin. He debated going after another refill, but decided not to bother. Agent Balboa nodded a greeting on his way to Director Vance's office, which Gibbs returned, before looking around the room. As it was the end of the day, most of the other agents were getting ready to go home. The new girl on Balboa's team was chatting with one of the guys from Legal, discussing dinner plans.

_There's an idea,_ Gibbs thought. _Maybe Abby and McGee will have something I can use when I get back._ For the second time in as many hours, Gibbs headed out of the building.

The evening rush was never the greatest time to try to order take-out. The crowd at the pizza place was making Gibbs edgy – almost like he was waiting for something, but didn't know what. The line at the pick-up counter was ten deep as soccer moms and single businessmen ordered their suppers and the general level of noise in the packed restaurant was giving him a headache. When he finally made it to the counter, he almost ordered a sausage, pepperoni, and extra cheese before he realized that DiNozzo wasn't going to be eating with them. The next pizza that immediately sprang to mind was the chicken-and-veggie mix that Ziva preferred. The cashier didn't notice the wry look that flashed across Gibbs' face as he placed his order.

After being told that it would be thirty to forty minutes before the pies were done, Gibbs parked himself against the wall next to a bench already crowded with other customers awaiting their dinners. Several minutes later, the woman on his immediate right spoke. "Waiting for a call?" She was pretty, in a tired sort of way, with a mass of curly brown hair, and was holding a little girl whose hair was identical. Despite the noise, the little girl was sleeping soundly on her mom's shoulder.

Gibbs looked down and found that he'd been toying with his cell. "No," he told the woman. "Just checking the time," he said, replacing the phone in his pocket.

From his tone, the woman – who had just been trying to make conversation to pass the time – knew he didn't really want to be bothered. But she had to smile to herself when, less than five minutes later, the phone was back in his hand. After watching him fidget with the cell for nearly twenty minutes, the clerk at the counter called her number. As she stood, she smiled at him. "You know, I'm sure your phone would be happier if you just call whoever it is you're waiting to call you." She adjusted her grip on her daughter and headed for the counter without waiting for a reply.

Gibbs scowled when he found the cell had made its way back into his hands without his consent. _Ah, to hell with it._ He flipped the phone open and hit speed-dial. _If nothing else, I can complain about them taking off late._

The call didn't ring through, though. Even with the crowd noise around him, Gibbs could clearly hear an overly-polite female voice. "The subscriber you have dialed is outside the service area. Please try your call again later."

"Order 519!" the clerk shouted over the din.

Gibbs snapped his phone closed and stepped forward to claim the pizzas he'd ordered. _What did you expect?_ He tried to ignore the twisting sensation behind his stomach. _Shoulda had them take a sat-phone with them._

* * *

**A/N2:** Okay, so… I'd originally planned for this chapter to start back at the beginning of the story and tell things from Gibbs' POV, catching him up to when I left off with Tony, Ziva, and Lizzie, but the muse had other plans. I'm not sure whose POV the next chapter will be, but I do know that there will be at least one more chapter from Gibbs' that will cover searching for the misplaced team members. Once I'm done with the story (however long it winds up being), I'll likely go back and reorganize the chapters so that the timeline doesn't bounce around so much. Sigh – when am I gonna learn not to start posting a story until I'm done writing it?

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please, especially since I don't really feel like I did Gibbs justice here.


	5. I Don't Need the Techno Babble

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** Though I'm feeling a little more confident in my portrayal of Gibbs, I still feel as though I'm not really capturing his character fully. Sigh.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_We were all feeling a bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it being a night of no small expenditure. – Alex, A Clockwork Orange_

The information on Hinton's SD card proved to be invaluable – not only was there a personal journal authored by the man, detailing the hows and whys of the theft, but there were also photographs and videos that substantiated the claims made by the now-dead man. It was more than enough to get warrants for Lieutenant Brussman's and Maxwell Arnette's arrests, once a judge was awake to sign off on them. For the time-being, Gibbs had sent McGee to track down where the remaining two-thirds of the group had gone for their 'vacation'. Abby, he sent home for the night.

While McGee worked on tracing down Brussman and Arnette, Gibbs focused on reviewing the evidence unearthed from the SD card and making sure the warrant paperwork was ready to go first thing in the morning, and so midnight came and went without his notice. When he finally set aside the paperwork and glanced at the clock on his computer, he had to take a second look to verify that it was, indeed, 0138. His general level of mistrust in technology had him confirming the time with his watch – which was a full minute faster than the computer.

The uncomfortable twisting sensation from his innards that he'd been trying to ignore for the past six hours (give or take a few minutes) came roaring back, stronger than before. Gibbs flipped open his cell and hit the speed-dial for DiNozzo.

"The subscriber you have dialed is outside–" He snapped the phone shut before the automated system could finish the statement. Opening the phone a second time, he tried the other member of his team, only to be met with the same recording. He managed to refrain from throwing the gadget across the room, but only just. Instead, he closed it with a frustrated sigh.

_Next time they go after something like this, they're taking a sat-phone. I don't care what the director has to say about it._ He glanced over at McGee. The techie was leaning his head on his hand, elbow propped on the desk, eyes closed and snoring faintly. _Suppose I can't blame him. He and Abby have put in more overtime the last two days on this than the rest of the building combined._ Rather than wake his agent – who was getting his first sleep in nearly a full forty-eight hours – Gibbs quietly got up and headed to the empty space in the L of the stairs. Once there, he opened his phone a third time.

* * *

Marie liked working the night-shift. Not only did she get a two-dollar-an-hour shift differential, but the number of calls she had to deal with were extremely low, particularly after nine in the evening, west-coast time. It allowed her to get paid for reading or doing crossword puzzles or working on the blanket she was knitting for the impending arrival of her third grandchild. Really, it was a pretty sweet setup. She only hoped she didn't get any lonely perverts calling in – those calls were the worst, particularly since company policy was that they could only hang up on 'dead air' calls (Marie called those calls 'pocket-dials').

Her headset chimed to announce that she'd received a call and she simultaneously set aside her knitting and checked the clock. It had been almost a full hour since her last call. "Thank you for calling National Cell customer service. This is Marie. How may I be of assistance today?" Even after five years working the night-shift, she still felt a little silly using 'today' in the standard greeting.

"Have a question for you," the voice on the other end of the line was gruff, masculine, and to-the-point. Marie smiled, _This shouldn't take long._

"I'd be happy to assist you. Is it regarding an account?" she asked.

"Might be," he replied. "I'm a federal agent and I've been trying to get through to a couple of my team members, but I keep getting a recording."

_Maybe I'll even get through this call without having to pull up an account and note anything – gotta love it when the IVR is down_. "I'm sorry to hear about the difficulty, sir. Which recording do you hear when you place your call?"

"Something about how they're outside the service area."

"I know the message," she replied. "What did you need to know?"

"What does it mean?"

Marie sighed mentally. _How stupid can some people be?_ "It means exactly what it says, sir – that the phone you're trying to connect to is outside the coverage area of whatever plan they're on." None of her thoughts showed through her voice.

"And if they're on one that's supposed to cover the entire nation?"

_Okay, maybe not as stupid as I thought, just not well-informed on how cell phones work._ "In that case, it would mean that the phone is out of range of a tower. For example, it could be in an area that doesn't have enough towers to fully cover an area – which is common in some rural areas – or that the phone's signal is being blocked by something along the lines of an elevator." Marie didn't even have to look the information up; after five years of answering the same ten questions over and over again, she could have probably done her job in her sleep.

"There any way to tell which it might be?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but there's no way to tell for sure just from the message. It's like if you call a land-line and get a busy signal; you don't know if it's because the phone's already in use, if it's simply off the hook, or if there's some sort of issue with the line."

"If I give you the numbers, could you tell me where the phone was last seen on your system?"

_Definitely not as stupid as I'd thought._ Marie frowned, _Looks like I'll have to note an account after all._ "As long as you're authorized on their account, I can give you a general area." The man on the other end of the line rattled off a number. She repeated it back to him. After he confirmed its accuracy, Marie pulled up the account. It wound up being a 'nested' account, with literally hundreds of individual lines connected to it. _Naval Criminal Investigative Service? What the hell is that?_ She noticed that the total line-count was only five lines from being classified as a major account and she gave another mental sigh – major accounts weren't her area. "Okay, I've got the account up. May I have the name on the account, please?"

"NCIS."

It was close enough. "Thank you, sir." She clicked through to the specific number that the man had given her to take her to the appropriate sub-account. "May I have your name?"

"Jethro Gibbs."

_That will make things easier – he's listed as having control over four numbers, including the one he gave me. _"Thank you, Mr. Gibbs. And I need the security code, please."

"The what?"

Marie almost laughed at the man's puzzlement, but kept her merriment out of her voice. "With this type of account, it's a four-digit number – usually the same number used to access voicemail."

The man gave her the number after a brief pause. "The phones I'm trying to call are under 'Anthony DiNozzo' and 'Ziva David'."

"Thank you, Mr. Gibbs. This will take me a few minutes to check, do you mind if I put you on hold while I do so?"

"Yes, I mind," the man's voice, which had been tinged with worry now showed an addition of growly anger.

"Not a problem, sir," Marie cheerfully replied, though she would have much rather been able to pull up the information he requested without having to talk while doing it – dead air was a major no-no in her line of work. "I'm checking Mr. DiNozzo's number first." She clicked on the number to bring up the most-recent-calls list. The most recent call had been at just past ten o'clock in the morning, mountain time, from the city of El Paso, Texas. In a small box in the lower right corner of the window was a series of letters and numbers in red text. The number was the designation of the tower that had last tracked the phone and the fact that it was red meant that the phone's GPS chip was not currently being tracked by the system. It only took a moment for her to see and process this information, and she continued talking while noting down the tower designation. "I show his last call came through the El Paso area at about ten their time this morning. I also have the tower designation number for the last place his phone was tracked with our system. Right now, I'm pulling up a list of all our towers to look up the physical location of this particular one. After that, I will –"

"I don't need the techno-babble," the man interrupted her. "Just tell me when you've got the intel I need."

Marie winced, but said, "Of course, sir." Thinking quickly, she managed to come up with a way to fill the silence while she cross-checked the tower's grid-reference and pulled up the appropriate map, she asked, "So what's the weather been like where you are?"

A derisive snort trickled over her headset. "Can't you work without talking?"

"I apologize, sir, but if you won't allow me to place you on hold while I look up this information, I have to fill the dead air somehow. It's a company policy."

On the other end of the line, Gibbs smiled a little – he had more than a passing familiarity with nonsensical bureaucratic rules. "Sunny and warm," he replied.

"Not fair," Marie's said, teasingly. "It's rained here for the last four days straight." She gave a little sigh. "Hazards of the Pacific Northwest, I suppose." She finally managed to find the appropriate tower on the map. "Ah, here we are. I've located the tower Mr. DiNozzo's phone was last traced through. It's located just outside Orogrande, New Mexico." She pronounced the town name as 'Or-o-grand'.

Gibbs made a 'hmm' noise. "Is there any way to get an exact location?"

_How did I know he was going to ask me that?_ Marie shook her head, even though she knew the man on the other end of the line couldn't see her. "I apologize, sir, but I only have access to the last tower the phone registered through. Anything more exact would need to go through our tech department, and their hours are from eight AM to six PM eastern time, Monday through Saturday."

"In that case, what sort of range am I looking at here?"

_Very definitely not as stupid as I thought._ "It depends on the terrain, sir. In a relatively flat area like Oklahoma, a single tower can have a range up to twenty miles. In mountain country, it might only be two or three miles."

"Do you have an exact location for that tower?"

"Yes, Mr. Gibbs. It's two miles southwest of Orogrande, a quarter-mile to the west of US 54." Before Marie could ask if he wanted her to check the other phone number he'd mentioned, the call was disconnected. "Hello? Hello?" Marie sighed. "And a good night to you, too," she muttered, turning her attention to entering in a note on the account. "Jackass."

* * *

Gibbs returned to his desk and wracked his brain trying to remember how to pull up the caller-ID list on his extension. After ten minutes of random button-pushing, he'd managed to change the display to Spanish, the time-format to Zulu, and the date readout to numerical year-date-month, but still hadn't managed to coax the digital piece of crap into revealing the information he needed. In frustration, he seized the phone and was about to tear it out of the jack and throw it across the room when his eyes landed on McGee. The team tech had shifted so that his head was pillowed on both arms on his desk and the faint snore had disappeared. Even in the low light, Gibbs could see McGee's eyes fluttering rapidly behind his eyelids. Gibbs took a moment to glare up at the ceiling before heading back to the empty space by the stairs.

He called information. After telling the computerized voice that he was looking for the non-emergency number for the police department of Gallup, New Mexico, there was a lengthy silence before an actual person came on the line. Even through his growing certainty that something was very, very _wrong_, he had to smirk – he always did love to confuse so-called modern 'conveniences'. The operator – _Are they still called that?_ – had the appropriate number located in less time than the computer had taken to connect him through to a live person. After agreeing to the one-dollar connect fee, Gibbs leaned against the stairwell, propping an elbow on the edge of one of the steps. It took another couple of minutes to get transferred through to the right extension. The phone on the other end rang three times, and Gibbs was just resigning himself to having to leave a message when a groggy voice answered. "Officer Daniels, Gallup PD."

"Special Agent Gibbs. You have any information on my agents?"

"Wha–" confusion laced the trailing syllable before the officer's brain caught up. "Oh. Sorry, Agent Gibbs. It's been a long couple of days. Your agents? Um… Give me a minute, and I'll call Grayson – he was supposed to meet them at the airport and pass along your message to have them call you." There was the sound of the telephone receiver being sat down on a hard surface, followed by the harsh beeping of a cell phone being dialed. After a moment of waiting, Gibbs was treated to Daniels' half of the conversation. "Hey, kid, those feds show? … No, was s'posed to be around nine. … I got their boss on the other line, wants to know why they didn't check in. … I see. … No, rookie, I know it ain't your fault. … No. Just stay there for now. … What, didn't they teach you about chain of evidence at that fancy college?" Gibbs had to bite back a laugh at that. Daniels may have been a local LEO, but he seemed to be one of the few that had their heads screwed on straight. "Look, Grayson, I don't care if you had a date with freakin' _Marilyn Monroe_, you're gonna stay there and do your _job_, else you won't have one come morning – we clear? … Good." The sound of a cell being snapped shut sounded over the line followed closely by a heavy sigh and a whispered 'rookies'. Then the officer was back. "Agent Gibbs, you still there?"

"Yeah. What've you got for me?"

"Looks like your agents were a no-show. Don't know yet if they were diverted to another airport or not – there was one hellacious thunderstorm tonight, made the ten o'clock news. If you want, I can call around and find out for you."

Yeah, Gibbs could see himself growing to like Officer Daniels. "No," he replied, that feeling of something wrong intensified until it was almost painful. "I'll have my people on it. Get some coffee or go home."

"I'll do that," the small smile was easily heard through the phone. "Call me if you need anything. You got my direct number, or did you have to go through dispatch?"

Gibbs grabbed his pen and a little notebook out of his pocket. "Dispatch. What's the direct?" He noted both Daniels' desk extension and the man's cell. "Got it," he said.

"Good," the officer replied.

Unknown to either of them, they managed to hang up simultaneously.

Gibbs stashed the cell in his pocket and strode over to his desk. "McGee!" he barked.

Tim startled into an upright position. "I'm awake, boss," he said, a bright yellow paperclip stuck to his cheek. He slowly blinked and awareness seeped into his expression.

"Find DiNozzo and Ziva," Gibbs said.

Tim felt as though Gibbs were trying to bore holes in his head with his eyes. A random thought flitted through his mind – something along the lines of being glad that laser-vision was a superpower and thus the domain of fiction only – before the seriousness of his boss's demand made an impact. And impact it did; rather like the impact a sumo wrestler would have on the concrete after being flung off the roof of the Sears Tower.

"They're _missing_?" McGee couldn't help but exclaim even as his hands moved to his computer.

"They didn't check in, so I called Gallup. Their plane didn't make it to the airport."

Though most people had difficulty 'reading' Gibbs, none of his team had that problem any more, so McGee could easily spot the worry circulating in his mind. _Hell, I can practically _feel_ it…though that might just be my own._ No further discussion was needed. Tim simply dove headfirst into tracking down what might have become of his teammates.

* * *

**A/N2:** Yes, I work in customer service, why do you ask? I had to put that bit in simply because I've been wondering just what Gibbs did before he had Tim or Abby to call on for tech-help.

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	6. Forty Eight Seconds

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** Just so you know, when McGee's thinking about White Sands, NM in this chapter, he doesn't just mean the National Monument, but the entirety of the White Sands Missile Range (which is adjacent to Fort Bliss). I don't know all that much about it, other than what I've gleaned in overhearing conversations around me, but I assume that White Sands lacks a constant manned presence, particularly with its proximity to Fort Bliss.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Hey, I don't believe that any system is totally secure. – David Lightman, WarGames_

Tim's first few steps were nearly identical to Gibbs' – he tried calling Tony and Ziva on their cells. Unlike Gibbs, however, he already knew what the message he connected to meant. In the course of doing his job (as Gibbs defined it), McGee had literally lost count of the number of times he'd had to triangulate a specific cell phone's GPS and had long since committed the various codes and 'back doors' he needed to access when tracking a phone through any of the carriers in the continental 48 to memory. If he had to track out-of-country, he usually bypassed the tower system entirely and logged directly in with the vast network of satellites orbiting the globe. Within five minutes of frantic typing, he had all the same information that Marie had passed along to Gibbs – even if he was unaware of this fact.

Tim's next step was to worm his way further into the system of the cell phone company and access their tech files. After the first three times he'd had to trace an NCIS cell, he'd stopped being surprised at how absurdly easy it was to skirt National Cell's security protocols; instead he let out a small sigh that combined relief that the company still hadn't upgraded their system and exasperation at that same fact – he knew that the bad guys usually had better techies in their pockets than any government agency could hope for, and the potential threat the lack of real security the phone company employed grated at him, but he refused to let himself complain since that same lack was currently working in his favor. Within half an hour of Gibbs' command, Tim had managed to locate the lists of towers through which the missing agents' cells had been traced. Several times, he'd been tempted to call Abby, if only for her company, but decided to let her get some well-deserved rest. He knew she wouldn't get any more until they found out what happened to Ziva and Tony.

Once he had that information, he accessed the bank of detailed topographic satellite maps available on the internal NCIS servers. Using these maps as a starting point, Tim managed to import the terrain details into the 3D rendering program he and Abby used when making computer models of specific crimes. Once that was done, he added the tower locations from the cell phone company. _And now, ladies and gentlemen, for my next trick, I'll need the assistance of someone in the audience! Any volunteers?_ McGee tabbed into his internet browser and looked up a phone number. As he dialed it into his phone, he took a moment to look around. _Wonder where Gibbs is?_ As the phone on the other end of the line began to ring, Tim shrugged. _Coffee, probably._

The call was answered halfway into the second ring by a deep voice laced through with both amusement and annoyance, "Dangit, Isabella, I told ya already – Little Miss got me sittin' tower 'til she gets back, an' no, ya can't come an' keep me comp'ny, not after what happened _last_ time."

Tim cleared his throat, "Excuse me?"

The man on the other end of the line let out a small chuckle. "Sorry, thought you was my girlfriend callin' back again. Startin' over – Yá'át'ééh, Cambry Airfield. Hok'ee Whitetail here. What can I do for ya?" (1)

Tim could only blink for a moment. The man's reaction was nowhere near what he'd come to expect from people being called in the middle of the night. "Um…" he shook his head and wrenched himself back on track. "I'm Special Agent Tim McGee from NCIS. I was hoping that you could give me some information –"

Before Tim could explain any further, Whitetail interrupted with, "No problemo, mi amigo. Whacha need?" (2)

"Two NCIS agents were scheduled to take a charter from Cambry Airfield yesterday –"

Whitetail cut him off once more, "Oh, yeah. They took off from here 'bout an hour, hour-an'-a-half late. Sorry 'bout that, but Little Miss had to come an' get me. My car died an' she can't take off without someone mannin' the tower."

"What time –"

"Quarter to three, local time," Whitetail replied, correctly assuming what Tim had wanted to ask. "Somethin' gone wrong, ain't it?" To this point, the man's tone had been full of cheer and boisterous good humor, but Whitetail's question was slightly hoarse and barely above a whisper.

"They never arrived in Gallup," Tim replied. "I'm trying to find out what happened."

"Hak'az shich'i' iidííjéé', an' I _know_ I ain't sick," the man muttered. Tim didn't even try to make sense of the unfamiliar syllables. "I'm guessin' ya want the flightplan, yeah?" (3)

"That would definitely help, Mr. Whitetail. Would it be possible for you to email them to me?"

"Aoo', where to? An' just call me 'Hok'ee' – ev'ry one else does." (4)

Tim recited his email address. Hok'ee repeated it back to him. "Okay," Whitetail said. "You should be gettin' 'em any minute now…" he fell silent for a moment. Just as Tim was about to thank the man for his help and hang up, Hok'ee made a clicking, hissy noise through his teeth. "Look, normally, I ain't real keen on helpin' feds. Kinda like how I ain't real keen on any of the times Little Miss done a jaunt inta Juárez," he pronounced the city's name with the appropriate Mexican accent, "but hak'az shich'i' iidííjéé'… Somethin' just don't _feel_ right. NWS been all a-jabber with the storms up in New Mexico all night an' Little Miss never, but _never_ let it go this long wi'out callin' afore. I'm gonna call up ta Kessel an' see iffen he got anythin'. You want me ta call ya back or email you?"

Tim didn't bother mentioning the fact that it was extraordinarily rare for him to have this sort of uncontested assistance, though some of his amazement did manage to seep into his voice, and replied, "Email would probably be faster – I'm probably going to be on the phone quite a lot in the next few hours."

"Will do," Hok'ee said. "I'll be in touch. Hágoónee', amigo." (5)

Whitetail hung up just as the email he'd sent arrived in Tim's inbox. McGee entered the flightplan into the 3D program and began calculating the plane's speed and altitude. He'd just managed to finish processing this when another email from Hok'ee popped into his screen. It contained numerous attachments, forwarded from someone else. Even though the general rule at NCIS was not to open any forwarded attachments from unknown sources, Tim's personal work-computer was a little better-protected than most others in the building. He buried himself in the weather data that was contained in the attachments – mentally noting that he needed to track down this 'Matthew Kessel' and buy the man a steak dinner, the normal turnaround for getting weather information out of the National Weather Service was 48 hours.

The bullpen was slowly brightening with a rapidly-approaching dawn when Tim finally managed to finish translating the files from Kessel into a format that the 3D program would accept. With the first streaks of pink and gold gilding the wispy clouds outside the window, Tim sat back in satisfaction and watched the animation on his computer. A cartoon plane took off from the airport and sailed quickly over countryside that alternated between flat valleys and jagged mountains. Small numbers ticked by in the corner of the screen; the first row showed the time that the plane would have been over that particular patch of ground and the second row revealed the plane's speed, direction, and altitude (all of which were calculated based on when Ziva's and Tony's cells managed to ping off of a tower). When the plane passed within close range of an identifiable landmark, the landmark showed up on the screen with its own label.

He still needed to confirm the model's accuracy, but it was a good start. He took a moment to stretch out the kinks he'd developed from sitting at his desk for such a long time, and then picked up his phone to call the airports that the charter would have passed along its route. One by one, Tim received confirmation – both orally and through emailed radar readouts – that his computer model was as accurate as it could get.

And then he reached the end of the line, so to speak, regarding cell phone towers and airport radar readouts. Neither were available between White Sands and Socorro, New Mexico. The small airfield in Socorro hadn't been able to locate any small aircraft fitting the flight designation number Tim had from the flightplan, nor had the slightly larger airfield outside of La Joya. He already knew that the plane hadn't reached Gallup.

From the weather information, and confirmation of the charter's course, McGee knew that the airplane was to have crossed White Sands at roughly the same time four smaller thunderstorms had merged to create a major supercell (which was currently making its way across the Texas panhandle, spawning chaos and havoc in its wake as it dropped funnel-clouds along the way). He knew he was closing in on an answer, but he didn't really want to face what the facts were slowly revealing to him.

_Come on, Timothy. You've managed to narrow down just where the plane went off the grid. If it… Stop it. Just say it. Okay. If it crashed, then it had to have been in this blank area around White Sands, because it never passed over any other markers between there and Gallup. So you need to call Fort Bliss and see if they managed to track it._ Matching his thoughts to his actions, he looked up the proper number and picked up his phone yet again.

* * *

Abby was sunning herself on a nicely warm rock.

_Wait a minute here, I don't do sun._

The air was full of a million different tastes and scents, caught as her tongue flicked rapidly out of her mouth.

_What?_

She could identify most of the scent/taste in the air, but not all and it bothered her, but not enough to make her go investigate. All the rain the night before had her feeling sluggish and if those scents/tastes were still there after she'd finished warming up, she may go check them out – unless that cactus mouse she could feel moving in its burrow nearby decided to poke its head out. In that case, food was more important than the source of confusing scents/tastes.

_No, really. I mean _what_?_

The echoing screech of a hawk ricocheted around the countryside, unheard by her.

_If I didn't hear it, then how do I know it's there?_

Her tongue flicked out again and caught a new scent. This time, it was easy to match it with the log of scent/taste housed inside her mind. It was smoke. Alarmed, Abby slithered off the rock and headed for her burrow, all thoughts of catching lunch or investigating the source of those weird smells gone.

Abby's eyes snapped open. "Man, I hate weirdo dreams," she grumbled. She glanced at her alarm clock and flopped back into her coffin with a sigh. "Too early to get up. I got at least another hour."

Just as she was about to reenter that place where waking stopped and dreaming started, a loud knock sounded on her apartment door. She made a growling noise and pried her eyes open again. "Just a minute!" she yelled, climbing out of her coffin and grabbing a bathrobe.

Still knotting the pink-and-blue skull-print terrycloth belt, she padded through her crowded living room and peered through the peephole.

Annoyance didn't so much fade as completely evaporate. A panicky sort of worry took its place as she flung open the door. "Gibbs!"

He handed her the tall glass of Caf-Pow he held. "Think you could come in early?"

A bajillion different scenarios flashed through her mind in the time it took for her to spin around and almost run for her bedroom – each more gruesome than the last. "I'll take that as a yes," Gibbs called after her.

"What happened?" she shouted as she closed the curtain that stood-in for a bedroom door.

"McGee's okay," Gibbs replied, managing to erase the man from her worry. "But DiNozzo and David didn't make it to Gallup. I've got McGee tracking them now. I'm sure he'd appreciate your help."

Abby didn't think she had ever dressed so quickly before in her life. She slid into a randomly-grabbed t-shirt (which was pink with a black rose printed on both the front and back) and a pair of black jeans. She ran a brush through her hair barely enough times to get the knots pulled out before tying it back in a rather messy ponytail. After she rammed her feet into a pair of slip-on boots (with four-inch platform soles), she returned to see Gibbs looking at his watch.

"Forty-eight seconds," he said, a slight smile on his face. Despite the smile, Abby had known Gibbs long enough to tell he was as worried as she was about the missing agents.

"Come on," she said, grabbing a jacket on her way past the wrought-iron coat-rack that stood next to her door.

Adrenaline, both from her worry and from Gibbs' unique driving habits, managed to keep Abby alert enough to drain half of her Caf-Pow by the time Gibbs pulled to a stop in his normal parking place. Abby, too impatient to wait for the elevator, took the stairs up to the main floor two at a time.

She arrived at Tim's desk only slightly out-of-breath to find him on the phone. He was jotting something down on a post-it note and gave her a tight smile in greeting. Abby impatiently waited for him to conclude his phone call. A few minutes passed before Gibbs arrived and Tim finally came to the end of his call.

"Well…?" Abby demanded.

"Just a minute, Abs," Tim replied, focusing on his computer. "Let me finish entering in this information, first."

Another five minutes passed during which time Abby managed to finish off her Caf-Pow and start gnawing on her fingernails. "Come on, Tim! What happened to Tony and Ziva?"

Tim made a few final keystrokes and nodded in the direction of the plasma television. He started the animation he'd been working on and began explaining what he'd found.

"The charter took off late, at 2:45 yesterday afternoon, mountain time. It passed over these cell towers and airports over the course of the next two hours." The towers and airfields flashed past the animated plane on the screen, then the image rotated and pulled back until they were looking at an overhead picture of the area, with a dotted line indicating the route the airplane had taken. "At approximately five o'clock, mountain time, the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for this area," the area lit up red on the map. "Radar from an Army group on maneuvers in the Fort Bliss area confirms that the plane was headed straight for the storm. The plane remained on their radar until it disappeared at 1727." Abby gasped, and Tim was tempted to stop his explanation to comfort her, but the hard look in his boss's eyes made him finish.

"It's possible that their transponder beacon simply fritzed-out and they didn't realize it. I haven't been able to get a hold of anyone at the Alamogordo airport yet, but it's entirely possible that the pilot decided to land there to wait out the storm."

Some of the tension managed to leech out of Abby – at least, until Gibbs spoke. "And if they didn't go there?"

Tim grimaced and indicated a portion of the map that was now glowing green, "Then we'll want to start looking in this area…"

Abby tore her eyes off the plasma screen and looked at Tim. "But…?"

Tim closed his eyes. "But there isn't an emergency beacon in the area."

All three of them knew, even if they didn't want to say so, what the lack of an e-beacon probably meant – that it was most likely that no one was capable of turning it on. "No," Abby said, and quite firmly at that. "They're fine. They have to be."

Tim didn't want to crush her hopes, but he felt obligated to point out, "The odds of surviving a light-aircraft crash are less than one percent, Abby."

He flinched a little at the glare she threw at him; somehow, it was more intimidating than any other glare he'd received from her before, even though she was lacking in her customary makeup and jewelry. "They're _fine_, Tim! And I'll prove it to you!" She turned on her heel and flounced away, heading for her lab.

McGee had to wince a second time when Gibbs' hand connected with the back of his head. "She didn't need to hear that, McGee."

"Sorry, boss," Tim replied, one hand going up to rub at his eyes. "It's just been a really _long_ night."

The elevator dinged as the first few early-birds began to show for work. Gibbs maneuvered Tim back to his desk. "What's the number for the Alamogordo airport?" McGee handed him a yellow sticky-note. "Get some rest while you can. I'll wake you when I find out anything."

* * *

Down in her lab, Abby made short work of hijacking a copy of the animation Tim had spent the majority of the night crafting. Though she should have been running some tests for Balboa's team, she threw her full focus into double-checking everything she could in Tim's work. _Missing agents take precedence over some petty officer dealing hash._ When all the math came back as being accurate, she turned her attention to the section of the map where Tim had indicated they needed to start searching.

A slow grin crept across her face as an idea dawned on her. She took five minutes and fixed her hair and applied the 'emergency backup' makeup she kept in her desk. She even donned the 'backup' collar she kept in her lab jacket. When she felt she was ready, she turned on her computer. Less than a minute later, she was video-conferencing with one of her favorite friends outside of NCIS.

"Hey, Ashton!" she greeted the NASA tech with a bright smile.

"Abby!" he returned her smile with one of his own – though it was a little hard to see through his beard.

"You really need to trim the beard, Ash," Abby said. "You're starting to look like a lumberjack." Mischief filled Ashton's eyes and he opened his mouth, but Abby held up a hand to stop him. "Not the time for _Monty Python_," she said. "I need a major favor."

Hearing the seriousness in her tone, Ashton frowned and leaned closer to his computer. "What can I help you with, Abs?"

* * *

**A/N2:** For those who don't recall, Ashton is from episode 1.11 (_Eye Spy_). And yeah, I was kinda on a roll today. This chapter just fell together really well. The next chapter (no, I don't know how long it will take to post) will go back to focusing on Tony, Ziva, and Lizzie.

1. Yá'át'ééh. – Hello. (Navajo)  
2. No problemo, mi amigo. – No problem, my friend. (Spanish)  
3. Hak'az shich'i' iidííjéé'. – I've got the chills. (Navajo, literally translated to 'I was jumped by the cold.')  
4. Aoo'. – Yes. (Navajo)  
5. Hágoónee'. – Goodbye. (Navajo)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	7. A Distant Ache

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **Lord and Lady, but this was hard to find the time to write. I've been working 12-hour shifts at my new job this past week – though I'll love the extra cash come my next check, I dunno iffen the work-sleep-work-sleep won't kill me first! So…yeah, um… Sorry for the wait? Anyway, enough of my nonsensical rambling. On with the show.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_It's kind of strange, isn't it? How the mountains pay us no attention at all. You laugh or you cry…the wind keeps on blowing. – Jed Eckert, Red Dawn_

Mesquite-smoked snake turned out to be rather tasty, though it would have taken a direct order from at least a lesser deity (or Gibbs) to get Tony to admit it. Food really wasn't much of a concern – snake aside, Tony had spotted numerous animals darting amongst the scrubby brush covering the valley that were, at least in theory, able to be eaten. There were large rabbits that had long, stiff ears poking up from their heads; three types of chipmunks, two who sported spotted fur and one with stripes; and prairie dogs in abundance. And that was just the 'small furries' Tony'd caught sight of; there were also god-only-knew how many snakes of varying species in the valley, not to mention the lizards and birds. Insofar as food that didn't need to be caught, Elizabeth stepped in and managed to locate quite a bit of plant life that Tony hadn't known could be eaten – like the seeds from mesquite, the purplish-red fruits off of prickly-pear cacti, and the flowering stems off of the sotol plant.

No, food wasn't a particularly big worry. What Tony was nervous about was their rapidly-dwindling supply of water. And, much to his confusion, he seemed to be the only one concerned about the lack of any potable liquid. Both Ziva and Cambry drank in small sips with an ease and apparent lack of apprehension that frustrated Tony. _To be fair, though, both of them did grow up in deserts. Maybe they're just more used to it than I am. _DiNozzo sighed and grit his teeth against the throbbing from his injured knee as he scooted back into the dubious shade of a small tree covered in wicked-looking thorns.

The sun was, if anything, more powerfully _hot_ than it had been the day before, even if the hazy mirage-shimmer seemed further away than it had on the tarmac of Cambry's family-owned airfield. A light breeze, which had been growing in strength all day, didn't even make a dent in the temperature. _If anything, it just makes me feel thirstier. Like standing under a giant's version of those hand-dryers in public bathrooms._

A fine dust rode the wind and coated the mobility-challenged agent with a thick layer of grime. The once-blue silk of his shirt was now a dirty beige, darkening to a sludgy-brown where sweat had soaked the expensive material. His pants were in worse shape, the designer summer-weight linen no match for sharp rocks and thorns hidden by the powdery dirt on which he sat. _When we get back to civilization, I'm going to check into the biggest hotel I can find and stay in the shower for a full week, see if I can't maybe run one of those industrial water-heaters cold._

He tossed another stick onto the small campfire and checked his watch. Ziva and Elizabeth had headed back along the plane's crash-trail once more, hoping to locate the pilot's toolkit and the emergency beacon it contained. They weren't due back for another two hours yet. Tony sighed again and took a look at what remained in his water-bottle. There was about an inch of liquid left in the bottom. He grimaced and took a tiny sip. The piss-warm fluid only made him thirstier as it turned the dust in his throat into mud. He still had his second bottle, but he had no idea how long they'd be out here. Caution had him keeping it in reserve. _Hell, I feel guilty enough that I can't seem to keep from pulling at the open one. Should still have most of it left, but it's so damn _dusty_…_ A scene from _Tremors_ flashed through his mind – the part where Val and Earl were talking with the good doctor and finding out that Edgar had died of thirst.

Tony forcefully pushed the movie out of his mind and cleared his throat. _Last thing I need is to start thinking about giant, man-eating monsters moving through the dirt_. He spat the wad of gunk he'd breathed in off to his left. _Nineteen feet. Not bad, DiNozzo. Still not even close to your personal best, but not bad for sitting on your ass._ When the breeze had first started blowing hard enough to pick up the tiny dirt particles – about half an hour before the girls had left – he had toyed with the idea of MacGuyvering some sort of mask to keep the dust out of his lungs, but neither of the girls had even seemed to notice the particulate in the air, so Tony had decided against it. Besides, the last thing he really needed was to be razzed on for looking like some sort of inexperienced city-boy – never mind the fact he _was_ an inexperienced city-boy.

He rubbed a hand across his face, wincing a little at how tight his skin felt. _You'd think that with all the grime I'm covered in, not to mention how I've been trying to stay in the freaking shade, that I wouldn't be sunburned. But, _no_. Can't ever have things go easy, huh? Just wouldn't be my life if it did. Hell, I'd probably die from shock if something managed to go easy, for a change. Now there's a thought,_ Tony smirked a little, though the expression was rather bitter. _Would I rather die from shock at something going easy or be accused of murder again? Hmm… Tough choice. Though if I could pick, I think I'd rather go with not having anything blow up for a year. _His bitter smirk faded, replaced with a wistful yearning. _God, that'd be nice. One year with nothing blowing up – nothing I own, am watching, or standing next to, at any rate. That'd almost be worth being accused of murder for a…what would it be? Third? Fourth time?_

He took another pull off his water bottle as he tried to think back over his years since graduating the police academy. _Helluva thing, DiNozzo, when you can't keep track of something like that. _The corners of his mouth twitched at the thought, delivered in his boss' voice. _C'm on, Boss. I know you gotta be lookin' for us by now. What's taking you so long?_

A gust of wind kicked up heavier grains of dirt and a mass of ash from the fire-pit. Not expecting it, Tony managed to breathe in at that precise moment. _Great_, he thought, coughing hard to get the flecks of sand and burned mesquite out of his windpipe, _just freaking _wonderful_. What the hell else is gonna go wrong? Haven't I breathed in enough shit over the years? I just know Pitt is going to want another series of x-rays when I get back – had enough x-rays I'm surprised I don't glow in the dark. That reminds me, he still owes me twenty bucks from last November. Told him he shouldn't've bet against Dallas. _Once the coughing ran its course, Tony finished off the last of the water in his open bottle, feeling only mildly guilty about it. _It was justified. I don't think even Gibbs could cough like that and not need a drink after_.

He tucked the empty bottle into the pocket of his pants, half-formed hopes of rain that night making him unwilling to part with the container. _Come on, Boss. Find us already._

* * *

Unknown to Tony, 'the girls' were, indeed, worrying quite a bit. However, while Ziva was silently fretting over leaving Tony on his own and the lack of available drinking water, Lizzie was more worried about the weather. The dull ache she felt from her bones, centered in the places where they'd been broken however many times, was one that only heralded a swift and dangerous drop in air-pressure. Not even approaching thunderstorms ached that badly.

For the fifth time in as many minutes, Lizzie halted in her tracks, looked first at her wristwatch and then up at the sky, before frowning and returning to the slow pace she'd set to scan the trail of wreckage for her toolkit. Ziva unwittingly echoed the frown and took a glance at her own watch. It was coming up on fifteen-hundred. "Miss Cambry?"

Lizzie spun around and faced the taller woman, her irritation and apprehension about their circumstances making her rather short-tempered. "¡Maldita sea, chica! My name is _Lizzie_. I ain't nobody's schoolmarm, an' I'll thank you ta _remember that_!" (1)

Though she didn't allow it to show on her face, Lizzie's minor rant had taken Ziva by surprise. She held her hand up in the universally-recognized 'calm down' gesture. "I am sorry. I was just curious if there was a reason you keep looking at the sky."

Lizzie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, ignoring the ache in her long-healed broken ribs as she did so. "Just…" she trailed off and reflexively looked up again. "It's gettin' late," she changed tactics. "We oughta head on back. Don't wanna have a rattler show up an' wind up bitin' Áłtsé Hashké 'cause he went an' poked it with a stick or somethin'." Matching words to actions, Lizzie abruptly turned around and started back towards the cave.

Ziva had little choice but to follow. She didn't complain, however. She wanted to get back to her partner almost as much as she wanted a hot bath and a tall, cold glass of Berry-Mango Madness. She'd even pay the extra dollar for whipped cream. Pulling her thoughts away from what she would do when they returned to civilization and back to their current circumstances, she fell into step beside the pilot and asked again, "What is it you are worried about?"

"I hurt," Lizzie replied.

Ziva blinked at the seemingly non-sequitor. "As do I. We _were_ in a crash last night."

Lizzie shook her head, "Not what I meant. Sure, I'm still stiff an' sore, but it ain't that what's causin' this. We got trouble headin' in – an' I feel like a damn fool for not realizin' it sooner."

"What can of firms is opening now?"

The mangled idiom managed to wrangle a bark of harsh laughter out of Lizzie. "Sweetheart, it's 'can of _worms_', though I reckon a can of lawyers'd definitely be scarier."

Ziva grabbed Lizzie's elbow and stopped walking, making her companion nearly trip in the process. "_Miss Cambry_," she laced the name with thinly-veiled venom, "my name is Ziva David, and I am a Mossad officer. You may use any version of my name which suits you, but quit calling me by those ridiculous apodos!" (2)

Despite the danger Lizzie could easily see flashing in Ziva's eyes, she had to smile. "No problemo, amiga. All ya had ta do was ask." She reached up and laid a hand on Ziva's wrist – the other woman had yet to let go of her arm. She tapped lightly on the pressure point just below her thumb.

Ziva recognized the implication that Lizzie could and, more importantly, _would_ utilize that little cluster of nerves to her advantage should the need arise and let go of the pilot's arm. They shared a moment of silence wherein more was communicated between them than either would have said aloud. Each recognized something of herself in the other: both were women in what was traditionally a man's field, both of their chosen carriers were inherently dangerous, and, as a result of those two points, both knew how to handle themselves in nearly any sort of situation.

Almost as though responding to some sort of invisible cue, they simultaneously turned and resumed their walk back to the cave. After about a dozen paces, Lizzie started speaking. "Weather's shiftin'," she said without preamble. "I c'n feel the pressure droppin' 'cause of all the bones I broke over the years. Gotta real bad feelin' it's gonna kick up some hellacious wind afore long, which is just gonna make survivin' out here all the harder. If it gets bad as I think, won't be nothin' left of our crash-trail come mornin', either. Leastwise, not nothin' that'd let folk know we're still down here. All the wreckage'll look like it been out here for years."

Now that it had been mentioned, Ziva could feel a distant ache in her own limbs – ghosts of broken bones past. "Perhaps we should continue looking for the emergency beacon."

Lizzie shook her head. "Naw, it's gone. Would take an act of God to find it. Fuck-all, it was enough of a miracle we survived the damn crash to begin with – Pippy weren't equipped for a stunt-crash, ya know – no cross-struts in the cabin, no web-harness, no _nothin'_ but an extra fifty gallons of fuel that coulda blown us all to hell an' back at any point from the lightnin' onwards. Not to mention how ya found Áłtsé Hashké's ruck an' those bottles of water this mornin'. I don't think we're due for any more miracles this trip."

Ziva couldn't really argue with any of that. Instead, she found herself moving faster. "Why do you call Tony…Áłtsé Hashké?" She stumbled a little over the unfamiliar phrase.

"Áłtsé Hashké?" Liz repeated the name, taking care to enunciate it clearly for Ziva's benefit.

Ziva nodded. "What does it mean?"

"It's the Navajo name for Coyote," Lizzie explained, easily keeping up with the increased pace. She pronounced the name as 'coy-YO-tay'. "In the legends, Coyote was the master of disguises and doublespeak. His favorite form of entertainment was to dish out ironic justice to folk what deserved it – like in one legend, he found himself in the company of a prideful mother who spoiled her children terribly; she let them run around an' do anythin' they wanted and never punished 'em for their bad behavior. So, Coyote got the kids to play a game where they dressed up as bear cubs. The pride-woman's husband – who had stood by an' let his wife run things with the kids – didn't know they were playin' an' took 'em for real cubs. The husband shot 'em and took the meat home to his wife, who cooked 'em up in a stew."

Ziva didn't understand the point of the story – she got the irony in the 'punishment' that Coyote had meted out well enough, she just didn't see how Lizzie could have possibly seen any echo of that sort of brutality in her partner. Something of her confusion must have shown on her face because Lizzie continued her explanation. "It's not like that," Liz said, obviously interpreting what she saw on Ziva's face correctly. "What Coyote did was as much for the kids' sake as to punish the parents. The kids weren't learnin' what they needed to be productive members of the tribe, an' Coyote knew that if they never learned how to help contribute, they weren't never gonna be accepted in the afterlife by their ancestors, an' they'd wind up becomin' part of the spirits what bring disease and bad luck. But he knew if they died while they was still kids, the ancestors would have to accept 'em. Coyote may come across as an asshole in a lot of his stories, but that's just the point – he makes himself look that way ta keep folk from lookin' too hard at him, ta keep folk from diggin' too deep, 'cause he really isn't as shallow an'…whassaword…frivolous as he seems; in fact, if he's got a major fault, it's that he tends ta care _too_ much about others' wellbein', but ain't never as concerned about his own hide."

Now _that_ described Tony to a 'T'. Ziva nodded her understanding. It had taken quite some time before she'd managed to realize that the playboy image Tony projected wasn't all there was to the man and it made her wonder just how the pilot had managed to understand that essential bit of DiNozzo so quickly after meeting him.

The duo continued to follow the crash-trail – which Ziva had estimated had scraped along the valley floor for _at least_ a full two or three miles before coming to a stop inside the cave – in a companionable silence for about ten minutes before Lizzie asked, "How's your head doin'?"

"Well enough," Ziva replied. "The headache is nearly gone now."

"Good," Lizzie said. The word almost sounded like a bark – her voice had been growing progressively hoarser as the day dragged onward. "Was more 'an a li'l worried last night. Takes one helluva knock to the noggin ta make someone's pupils different sizes."

"No," Ziva disagreed. "Perhaps your eyes were playing tricks. It was not that bad."

"Hah! You can't bullshit me, darlin' – I know better. An' I _know_ what I saw."

Ziva let the nickname slide. In all honesty, she was rapidly coming to like the pilot. "There was not enough light last night to have made an accurate assessment of my eyes, _Lizzie_. You did not once shine the flashlight in my face, so how can you be certain of what you think you saw?"

"You tryin' ta tell me you _weren't _seein' two of everythin'?"

Ziva gave Liz a wry half-smile. "Maybe so, but it was nothing I have not dealt with in the past." She shrugged, "Besides, I heal quickly."

Lizzie let out another bark of laughter, "Ah, to hell with it. You woke up an' seem fine ta me, so no use worryin' about it now."

A gust of wind, somewhat stronger than the steady breeze, whipped up a dust-devil in their path. The swirling vortex danced briefly between a sagebrush shrub and a stand of creosote before disappearing. Ziva and Liz both glanced at the sky, then at each other.

Their already-fast pace increased to a jog, any worry over the lack of water forgotten.

* * *

**A/N2:** According to a PM from one of y'all, I may have fudged slightly on describing Ziva's concussion in an earlier chapter – apparently, unequal pupils is the sign for a _major_ concussion, not the minor one the character wound up with. All I can really say is that I'm surprised my all-things-medical-beta (AKA – Mom, the retired RN) didn't notice the flub and call me on it. However, I hope I addressed the issue in a reasonably logical manner.

Oh, and the thing on Coyote is a mishmash of all the various and sundry native legends on the trickster-god coupled with a hefty dose of BS on my part, so don't take it too seriously, please.

1. ¡Maldita sea, chica! – Damn it, girl! (Spanish)  
2. apodos – nicknames (Spanish)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	8. A Helluva Time

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **I still have nothing at all to do with the band America, either – and I managed to kill my own earworm by giving it to Tony…I'll need to remember this successful maneuver for future reference.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_I can't lie to you about your chances, but you do have my sympathies. – Ash, Alien_

"I been through the desert on a horse with no name," Tony sang along to the tune that had been on an endless loop in his brain since he woke up that morning. "Felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert, you can remember your name, 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain." He wasn't even aware he was doing it out loud – his mind was too busy trying to remember how to process rational thought. "La, la, la-la-la-la, la-la, la, la la…" He trailed off as his mind played the musical bridge that linked the verses with the chorus. _Could use some rain,_ he thought, the words trying to wedge themselves through the music only he could hear. _'Cause there ain't no water for my pain…_ He laughed softly at the improvised lyric before starting in on the chorus again.

He'd stretched out on the dusty ground about an hour earlier, pillowing his head on his backpack and staring up at the thin, wispy clouds racing past overhead. Both of the now-empty water bottles made interesting plasticy popping noises every time he shifted. The small tree with the needlelike thorns was still providing him with some shade, but it wasn't enough to stifle the ever-growing heat; nor did it provide adequate shelter against the freshening breeze. _Though, to be fair, it's not really a breeze any more. I think it finally grew up. It's wind now. Real wind. Teenagery wind, even. Lots of moving and gusts of meaningless angry bluster that only _seem_ like the end of the world. _"…through the desert on a horse with no name, felt good to be out of the rain…"

Almost as though it had heard his thoughts, a strong burst of wind shot through the small valley, scouring dust and sand up from the ground and flinging it with wild abandon – not totally unlike a teenager shouting at a parent that 'I'm an _adult_, damn it!'

A plume of bone-colored dust snaked its way into Tony's mouth as he took a breath to continue singing. The resultant coughing fit managed to successfully halt the earworm…for a moment, at least. _Damn dust. Damn wind. Damn plane crash. Damn storm last night._ The list continued on and on until the coughing died down and the spikes of pain roused by the motion dulled back to the distant aches Tony was rapidly becoming all-too-accustomed to. He scrubbed a hand across his face and grimaced at the combined sandpapery feel of stubble and grit before wincing at the harsh squeak of protest from the sunburn. Some portion of his brain not currently occupied with damning everything and everyone who had landed him in this predicament or with rebooting that _damn song_ noticed that his face was as dry as the dust which covered it and tried to raise an alarm. Unfortunately, at that moment, the earworm started up its music once again and the alarm went unheard.

"You see, I been through the desert on a horse with no name, felt good to be out of the rain," Tony started singing again. _How can I feel crappier now than when I first got up? I mean, usually I feel worst right after waking, but it quits aching as bad the more I move around. 'Side from the knee, all it is is bruises. Shouldn't feel this tired. Damn sun. Damn wind. Damn dust._ The litany began again. "In the desert, you can remember your name, 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

Just as he was about to start in on the 'la-la' portion of the chorus, some part of himself not yet dried into DiNozzo-jerky managed to notice the distinctive _swasssh-swasssh_ of booted feet navigating through the dust and sand. It even managed to still his ceaseless singing, though the music still played between his ears. He had to grin a little when Cambry's footsteps halted and she said, "Oh, _shit_. You look three-quarters _baked_, Áłtsé Hashké."

Ziva didn't say anything, but she did hurry over to where most of him was spilling out of the tiny pool of shade under the mesquite tree. Tony chuckled, the sound a little harsh even to his own ears. "Naw," he argued. "Not three-quarters. Half, maybe, but surely not more than that."

"Where is your water?" Ziva asked, looking around Tony.

"I drunk…dranked…screw it. It's been swallowed already. You still have some?"

"Yeah," Cambry replied. "But I ain't sharin', not just yet. You think you can sit up?"

Tony chuckled through a throat that felt like sandpaper. "Sure," he replied. "No problem." After a moment of simply lying there, he turned his head to look at the pilot. "My arms still 'tatched?"

Ziva leveled a look at her partner that Lizzie couldn't interpret. "Of course they are, Tony," the Mossad officer sounded far more patient than Lizzie had been prepared for. "Why would they not be?"

"Maybe I'll just stay here," Tony said, instead of clarifying his question.

"Come on, Áłtsé Hashké," Liz knelt next to Tony. "I'll give ya a hand up."

Ziva stepped forward and took a similar stance on her partner's other side. Together they managed to pull Tony into a sitting position. Once upright, he opened his eyes – he wasn't sure when he'd closed them – and immediately wished he hadn't. The world looked like it was trying to slowly slip off to the left.

"Hey, stop that!" Elizabeth shook his shoulder, somewhat alarmed by the sudden addition of pale green to the dusty beige and sunburned red on his face. "You ain't gonna sick up on me or on Ziva here, no matter how dizzy ya get, hear me?"

Tony pried his eyes open again. "'M not dizzy." The headache which had snuck up on him while he was stretched out was thudding in time to the music playing in his head.

"¡Hombre terco!" Liz muttered, earning a nod of agreement from Ziva. (1)

Tony made an odd little snorting noise. "Am not stubborn," he protested.

"Yes, you are," Ziva argued as she pulled his left arm around her shoulders. "But it is not necessarily a bad thing," she explained while Lizzie pulled his right arm around her own shoulders.

"Yeah," Elizabeth agreed. "On three?" she met Ziva's gaze.

Ziva nodded, "One."

Liz shifted herself to a better angle. "Just means that ya got the power of conviction on your side, even iffen ya ain't right."

"Two," Ziva said, readying herself.

"Three," Lizzie and Ziva said it together, then stood, pulling Tony with them.

"Whoa, where're goin'?" Tony asked, his eyes once again clenched shut against the rebellious rocking of the world around him. Even the shriek of pain from his injured knee protesting the change of position had to take second place to the untethered feeling of his brain.

"Back up inta the cave, Áłtsé Hashké. You're 'bout two steps shy of full-blown heatstroke, an' we ain't got any ice ta cool ya with, so we're gettin' ya outta the sun."

"Oh," was the only thing DiNozzo could say as he found himself part-carried and part-dragged back up the slope to the mouth of the hole in the cliff wall.

About twenty minutes later, Ziva and Liz had Tony settled in the darkest corner of the cave, reclining on his backpack. He was slumped in a rather uncomfortable-looking position, with his knee propped up on a rock and his chin resting on his breastbone and one arm lying on his stomach while the other was sprawled out to his side. If it weren't for the faint humming coming from him, a casual observer might have mistook him for sleeping…or dead. The layers of dirt and grime covered most of the bruises, cuts, and scrapes while the low level of light washed out underlying colors to a uniform pale sand-color that almost had him blending in with the cave wall.

Ziva took a deep breath and tore her gaze from her more than slightly out-of-it partner and looked to the pilot. Elizabeth was staring sadly at the remains of her airplane. The petite brunette sighed and took off her hat. "I picked a helluva time to quit smokin'," she said. "Could do with a smoke right now."

"Pardon?" Ziva stepped closer to where Liz stood.

Lizzie just shook her head. "It's Hok'ee's fault. Bet me a grand I couldn't quit cold-turkey last week, but I figured it wasn't gonna be all that dif'rent from any of the times I landed in the hospital. Hell, I once landed in traction for six months – cracked vertebrae, ya know – an' they didn't lemme smoke once in all that time. Thought is was gonna be easy. Didn't figure on this, though," she made a grand gesture to the carcass of her plane. She sighed again and made a clicking noise with her tongue. "Fuck it. We get outta this, first thing I'm gonna do is gladly had Hok'ee that thou an' go get me a carton of Marlboro Reds. Chain-smoke those suckers, an' be glad of each'n'every lungful of sweet cancerous smoke…"

Just as Ziva was about to ask a question, Liz sighed a third time and started stripping out of her jacket and brown-and-yellow checked flannel. "What are you doing?" Ziva changed the question she was going to ask as the pilot handed her the jacket and shirt.

"You still got that knife?" Lizzie asked. Ziva nodded. "Good. You take my jacket and shirt there an' see about gatherin' up some more prickly-pears. I got a pair of leather work-gloves in the jacket – you'll need 'em. Just the purple-red fruits, mind. Oh, an' see iffen ya can't get the campfire moved in here, too."

"And what will you be doing?" Ziva asked.

Liz bent over and began unlacing her boots. "I'm gonna climb the cliff, see iffen maybe I can't figure out where the fuck we are. Got the feelin' it's gonna come in handy."

Ziva pulled the denim jacket on overtop her once-white shirt. It was a little snug across her shoulders, but that was to be expected as Elizabeth was four inches shorter and about thirty pounds lighter than she was. The gloves the pilot had mentioned were in an inner pocket on the left. "What will we do about drinking water?"

Lizzie pulled her boots off, followed quickly by her socks. She stuffed the socks into the boots before tying the laces of the boots together. "No problem on the water, Ziva. That's what the prickly-pears are for. Even if we found a waterhole out here, I wouldn't drink from it – there's too much alkali out here for it ta be totally safe. But the prickly-pears don't gotta worry none about the alkali, an' they're real juicy. If there weren't no fruits, we could eat the gel in the leaves, but the leaves can be real sour. Pro'ly lucky it's fruit-season."

While talking, Liz had further stripped down until she was standing barefoot in the cave, holding her jeans and t-shirt in one hand, wearing nothing more than a red sports-bra, a pair of teal girl-boxers, and her wristwatch. The small spattering of freckles visible on her face made a near-violent explosion across her shoulders, criss-crossed with old scars and striped over with wide purple bruises from where the restraining harness had held her to her seat during the crash. One scar was particularly interesting as it was thicker than most of the others and reached from under her bra to snake over her right shoulder. Ziva wondered what had caused it even as she found herself slightly jealous of Elizabeth's physique – the pilot lacked a single ounce of fat and each and every muscle was defined and visible through scarred and freckled skin. Though Ziva knew she was in top physical shape, she still had _some_ fat under the skin that no amount of working out ever seemed to rid her of, particularly around her lower abs and inner thighs.

Cambry folded her jeans and t-shirt and stacked them on top of her boots, noticing, but not caring, the appraising eyes skimming across her. To be completely honest, she would have traded Ziva bodies in a heartbeat – another four inches of height and just enough 'padding' to actually have curves would have made her social life a helluva lot more interesting. _That's the problem with the men down here; they all want someone who has that hyper-feminine look, with hips and that soft, curvy silhouette. They don't want someone who's all knees'n'elbows._ "Hey, could ya hand me that hair-tie I got in the pocket? Left side."

Ziva found the elastic band with no trouble, nestled in among a tin of mints and a pack of gum, and handed it over. Liz pulled her curly brown hair – streaked through with red and blonde – up into a messy knot on the back of her head. "Grass is always greener, huh?" she said with a light grin, slinging the strap to her catch-all over her head to rest at an angle across her chest.

Ziva had to chuckle in agreement. "Yes, it is."

With that, both women headed back into the sun, unaware that Tony had been watching the entire exchange. _Wonder if she'd be up for a drink when we get out of here?_ he mused, a lecherous smirk pulling uncomfortably on his sunburned face.

* * *

Liz paused and looked up. There was only another twenty feet or so to go before she reached the shelf she was aiming for. The bruises crossing her shoulders screamed in chorus with the myriad aches and pains she'd accumulated in the crash, but Elizabeth steadfastly ignored the complaints. Feeling her way with her toes, she found another foothold and boosted herself upwards. Hand over hand and bit by agonizing bit, she inched her way up the cliff face. Windblown grit scoured her bare skin even as the sun baked new freckles into existence, but she considered it a light price to pay – the last thing she had wanted was to get most of the way up the cliff face, only to have a bootlace or the cuff of her jeans snag on a rock and send her falling to a messy and no doubt painful death. _And it ain't like I need the extra protection from snakes up here. The snakes 'round here can't climb._

She very nearly managed to startle herself into falling anyway, when a questing hand reached the empty space where a jut of stone made a narrow shelf on the cliff. Instead of falling backwards, however, she tightened her grip on the stone with her toes and pushed herself that last little distance onto the shelf. Panting from exertion, she took a moment to catch her breath. The wedge of stone on which she lay was only about a foot, foot-and-a-half deep, but it was a good thirty or so long. Carefully, Elizabeth pushed herself into a sitting position, resting her back on the sun-warmed rock, and dangling her legs over the edge.

Under normal circumstances, Liz had absolutely no fear of heights, but there was just something unique about being so high up, but still on the ground, that came with free-climbing that managed to get her pulse going in a way that even the most stomach-churning aerobatic maneuvers had long since stopped doing. When her heart-rate and breathing dropped back to normal levels, Lizzie took a moment to check on Ziva.

During the hour or so it had taken her to climb the three hundred feet to her current perch, Ziva had managed to move the campfire and was now cutting spiny fruit off of the large patch of prickly-pear that grew against the cliff wall. The whatever-it-was officer seemed to be taking out the frustrations of the past day on the hapless cactus. Even from so far away, and over the incessant wind, Lizzie could hear the occasional curse or oath as she hacked through the spiny growth. _When I get back down there, I'm gonna hafta ask her just what that word she keeps sayin' really means. 'Leazazel'… Sounds almost too pretty ta be a curse-word._ (2)

Pushing her musings from her mind, she reached into her catch-all and retrieved her compass. She opened it, taking care to line up the small magnifying glass with the vertical slit (which had distance-markers ticked into the metal to either side). The other piece of equipment she withdrew from the bag was a pair of small, but powerful, binoculars.

Lizzie scanned the horizon with the binoculars first, and grinned when she caught sight of a very familiar peak in the distance. Trading the binoculars for her compass, she rapidly calculated their distance and direction from the mountain. She noted the results of her calculations in her battered memo book before returning to the binocular search of the horizon. It took quite some time before she managed to glimpse the distinctive shape of another mountain she knew – the wind-borne dust and sand had halved the visibility of distant landmarks. She again calculated their distance and relative position with the aid of her compass, noting her findings in the memo book when she finished, and then re-stored her tools in the canvas catch-all.

"Come on, girl, time to head back," she whispered to herself. Lizzie took a moment to simply breathe before rolling onto her stomach and dropping over the edge of the narrow ledge on the cliff face.

Going down the cliff was both easier and harder than climbing up had been; this time, gravity was working in her favor, but her muscles were none too happy with having to control the descent. By the time she finally climbed down far enough to drop, exhausted, at the base of the cliff, her arms and legs felt more like jello than actual parts of her anatomy.

Still, she managed to drag herself into the relative safety of the cave. Once her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light, she found herself smiling at what she saw. Ziva had not only transferred the fire to a neatly-outlined circle of stones inside the cave, but she'd also managed to locate and bring in a bushel of dry, thorny mesquite branches, broken down to an appropriate size, and stacked neatly between the fire and the cave wall. Another neat stack, this one pyramidal in shape, of reddish-purple prickly-pears rested midway between the firewood and where Ziva sat with Áłtsé Hashké. Her two companions were awake and talking in low tones while eating some of the pulpy fruit. A small pile of spiny fruit skin sat on the rock at Ziva's elbow.

Elizabeth's flannel shirt and her jacket were folded neatly and stacked next to her boots, jeans, and t-shirt. Coaxing her over-tired limbs one last time, Lizzie pulled on her jeans and t-shirt. Until they were rescued, or unless she had no other options, she wasn't intending on putting her boots back on – she hated the feel of dirty socks, and refused to wear boots without socks.

Re-dressed, she flopped next to the two feds. She was glad to see that Áłtsé Hashké was starting to look more like himself. "Heyla," she said, tiredly digging out her memo book and the topographical map of the area. "Miss me?" She didn't bother waiting for a reply before she continued. "Good news is that I think I can figure out exactly where we wound up, but the bad news is that the wind is gonna get a helluva lot worse 'fore it gets better. Come nightfall, y'all'll be damn glad we got this handy-dandy li'l cave. May wanna see iffen we can't move what's left of Pippy ta block the entrance much as we can, too. But that'll come later." She flipped the memo book to the right page and spread out her map.

"So where are we?" Tony asked, peering down at the map.

"Well, I got a damn good look around. Caught sight of Strawberry peak to the south of us, an' I could just make out Gunsight beyond," Liz pointed to the appropriate spots on her map. "So we're…" she free-drew a couple of surprisingly straight lines, "around here – give or take a mile or two."

"And this means…?" Ziva prompted.

Liz grinned and met her companions' faces in turn. "This means we're maybe a li'l less'an twenty miles from Tularosa, an' somewhere around fifteen miles from a pretty well-traveled road. Iffen no one finds us come sundown tomorrow, an' iffen the wind dies off tonight, we can hike due east and be guaranteed we'll come 'cross _someone_."

Tony frowned. "Hate to burst your bubble, there, kiddo, but I'm not really up for a fifteen or twenty _yard_ hike, let alone fifteen or twenty _miles_." Hell, his knee was already grumbling in protest at the mere _thought_.

"Do not worry, Tony," Ziva said, patting his shoulder. "I am sure that if it comes to it, we will figure something out."

Mental images of using either of the girls as crutches, or worse – having them drag him across the desert on some sort of MacGuyvered sled – ran through his brain. "That's what I'm afraid of," he muttered.

* * *

**A/N2:** So, this chapter is a little longer than the rest, but since the last one was slightly shorter, I figured it'd all balance out in the end! Hope y'all're enjoying it, still!

1. ¡Hombre terco! – Stubborn man! (Spanish)  
2. Leazazel – (online sources state that this is the Hebrew word for 'hell', but independent research indicates that this is inaccurate – but Ziva says it on the show, so… Well, I'll use it, but I ain't happy about not knowing what it means!)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	9. Catch a Butterfly

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **I also don't own _2001: A Space Odyssey_. Hell, to be honest, I don't even like it very much – the book was okay, but it never should've been made into a movie…the music's way awesome, though.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Sometimes, you have to lose yourself 'fore you can find anything. – Lewis, Deliverance_

"I'm telling you, Abby, there's nothing there!" Ashton took a moment to chug down a couple of swallows of Buzzy – Caf-Pow's grape-flavored competition. "Well…there _is_, but not what we're looking for. You'd think, what with a population of right around three thousand, _someone_ woulda noticed _something_ and posted it on their blog – but not only are the servers not peeping out so much as a single relevant term, but there's absolutely nothing even remotely resembling a crash in the immediate vicinity!"

Abby made an odd sort of growling noise. "It has to be there somewhere, Ash. I triple-checked the math on this, and they had to have _landed_," she refused to use the word 'crash', "within five miles of Tularosa. I'd have a narrower field for you, but we aren't exactly sure how high they were flying when they happened on that storm."

Ashton pinched the bridge of his nose and squenched his eyes shut. It had only been about two, maybe two-and-a-quarter hours since Abby'd first contacted him. Half an hour of negotiations with various and sundry corporations and government organizations who owed him favors landed them with a full eight hours of satellite time – oddly, through Google Earth, of all things – followed by meticulous scanning of the monotonous desert landscape surrounding Tularosa, New Mexico. Sure, he'd spent far longer staring at computer screens before, but…it was _Abby_, and he hated disappointing her. "Hey, how about you shoot me a copy of the information you have. I'll run it through HAL and see if he comes up with the same area."

Abby's eyes narrowed dangerously, "Are you insinuating that my math isn't up to par?"

"Not at all," Ashton quickly reassured her. "Just that maybe we're missing something that's loitering in his memory banks."

The forensic scientist chewed on the inside of her lower lip for several minutes, considering the offer. HAL was the nickname that Ash and his cohorts at NASA had given the supercomputer (whose real 'name' was a complex string of letters and numbers that no one but the most anal of NASA employees even bothered to learn, let alone _remember_) that was responsible for tracking each individual orbit of every satellite, abandoned hunk of junk, and left sock hijacked from its mate circling the planet, thus ensuring that some corporation's multi-billion-dollar communications uplink didn't inadvertently ricochet off of the old Cold War missile-satellites and inadvertently start World War Three. HAL was also used to run weather forecasts for shuttle-launch days, calculate the individual risk-level of the largest chunks of the asteroid belt, and was also asked for winning lottery numbers more often than anyone at NASA would admit…Not to mention the fact that some fearless programmer had hijacked a corner of HAL's immense, multi-terabyte memory banks to archive a collection of old eight-bit computer games (including _Pac-Man_, _Pitfall_, and _Frogger_, among others).

"You thinking he might catch a butterfly?" Abby asked. (1)

Ashton shrugged, "Maybe. At this point, anything would be more helpful than going back over that five-mile-radius around Tularosa."

Abby nodded and sent the files she'd borrowed from McGee to the NASA tech. "That's everything we've got."

"I'll feed this into HAL right now – it's early enough that no one should be using him right now." Ashton turned slightly away from his webcam and started typing frantically on a smallish keyboard adjacent to his primary. "Well, let me amend that – aside from Donnie, down in sublevel six, who's always playing _Spaced Invaders_ about this time – no one should be using him right now."

Abby grinned at the thought of Donnie Benreal, hater of all things frivolous, actually playing a video game. "How long, do you think?"

Ash shrugged, not looking away from the screen he was working with. "No way to say for sure, Abs. Might be hours, might only be a few minutes. All depends on what info's available and where it's been stashed." He made a final few dramatic strokes on the keyboard. "Done," _click_, "and done." He turned back to Abby. "Now…we wait."

Abby's grin faded and she sighed. "I hate waiting."

* * *

Tim had tried to sleep, but it just wasn't happening. He had made himself comfortable at his desk, pillowed his head on his arms, and closed his eyes, but worry kept his thoughts racing too quickly for his brain to shut down. He'd even tried counting backwards from one thousand – a trick which had never failed him in the past – only to give up when he reached a new all-time low of five-hundred-sixty… Though, to be fair, he'd probably have reached four-ninety, as he was pretty sure he'd managed to count back through the eight-fifties two or three times, and the seven-forties at least twice. And that wasn't even touching on the fact that he'd completely lost count when Gibbs had returned from the L behind the stairs following his call to the Alamogordo airport and muttered, "Damn it, DiNozzo. Where the hell'd you go?" before starting in on some paperwork.

In fact, for the last hour, Tim had been surreptitiously watching as his boss spent three minutes or so filling in forms before staring at his desk phone for a full five before returning to the forms to repeat the process all over again. Eventually, Tim finally gave up even _trying _to sleep and sat up. "Not at Alamogordo?"

"No," was Gibbs' terse reply. "There any other places they could've landed?"

"I checked all the airports in the area…" Tim trailed off as a thought struck him. "Though, I could double check a couple of them and see if anyone reported an emergency landing on any of the roads down there." McGee hit the spacebar on his keyboard to wake his computer, already running through a mental list of the airports he should check a second time.

"I already contacted the local LEOs," Gibbs said, "and they're going to start looking on their end."

Tim nodded, mentally crossing those numbers off his list of calls to make.

* * *

Detective Maury Brenton Daniels of the Gallup, New Mexico police department startled himself awake when someone kicked the side of his desk. "I'm awake," he announced, rather unnecessarily, blearily rubbing sleep-sand from his eyes. A light chuckle of amusement had him on his feet in a heartbeat; he nearly managed to overturn his chair in his haste. "Kara!" he grinned, showing off white, even teeth, marred only by an impressive chip out of his left front tooth.

"Morning, _dick_." Kara mirrored his grin. Their expressions weren't the only thing that were identical about them – both had dark red hair, streaked with grey at the temples, average brown eyes, square jaws, and high cheekbones. Even with Officer Daniels in his badly-wrinkled cotton-blend navy suit and Kara wearing her black uniform, it was obvious they were siblings.

Maury shook his head at the greeting, which Kara'd been using ever since he first made detective more than a decade earlier. "To what do I owe the pleasure, sis?"

Kara handed him one of the styrofoam cups she held. "First off, you should finish wakin' up proper. Then…we'll see."

"Mmm…" Daniels made a noncommittal noise as he popped the plastic lid off the liquid heaven in a cup and breathed in the steam. "No, I'm good. Whacha need?" he sipped from the cup and sank back into his chair.

"How long you been here?" Kara asked, noticing the layers of paperwork and fast-food wrappers littering the top of her brother's normally-neat desk. She adjusted her holster with her left hand while nudging some of the wrappers out of the way before perching on the edge.

Maury scrubbed a hand across his face, "Too long."

Tsking, Kara drained the last of her own coffee and sat the empty cup on top of a precariously-balanced stack of manila folders that stood between Maury's telephone and the desk lamp. "And you wonder why Suzy left you," she teased, a fond smile on her face – she knew exactly how important The Job was, and had never really liked Susanna to begin with. "Anyway, got a squawk on a pair of possibly-missing feds just as I come off-shift this morning. With what you were tellin' me yesterday about the body at the Best Western, thought I'd drop by."

Daniels yawned and rolled his head around on his neck, hoping to dislodge the sizable knot that he'd acquired while sleeping at his desk. "Yeah, their plane never arrived last night. That reminds me, I should probably head over to the airport. Left Grayson on his lonesome."

Kara snickered, "All night?"

Maury shrugged, "Isn't that what rookies are for?"

"I suppose," she flicked her braid over her shoulder. "Anyway, on to why I dropped by, I got 'til Monday off – gotta love twelve-hour shifts for allowing long weekends – and thought I'd head down Alamogordo way. If those feds don't show on their own, someone ought to see about startin' up a search."

"Shoulda known you'd be heading out," Daniels said. Ever since Kara had gotten lost in Gila National Forest for five days when she was thirteen, she'd been wholly supportive about search-and-rescue missions, volunteering herself any time one was needed, provided she wasn't on-duty.

"So, you with me?"

Daniels surveyed the mess that was his desk and started stowing the empty coffee cups and wrappers in his already too-full trashcan. For the first time he noticed that the day shift was starting to trickle in and he exchanged a nod of greeting with one of them. "Yeah, just gimme…say, an hour to clean up and clear it with the chief. Parker shouldn't have too much to say against it – it _is_ case-related, after all. He might want to see if Carla can come in for the day, though, so it might be another couple of hours before we can leave." Carla was Maury's partner, but she was currently riding the tail-end of her maternity leave.

"Okay. I'll head over to your place and wait for ya," Kara replied.

Daniels nodded, already working on stowing the manila file folders back into the battered filing cabinet that stood in the corner behind his desk. "Why don't you see if Uncle Max can put us up while we're down there, yeah?"

"Already called him," Kara said as she slid off the edge of her brother's desk. "He and Aunt Amy will have lunch ready for us when we get there."

* * *

Gibbs found Ducky and Palmer just settling into their day. As it had been a couple of weeks since they'd received a 'visitor' to Autopsy, the two of them were getting a head start on inventorying their supplies and other necessary quarterly concerns. Currently, Palmer was climbing into one of the lower drawers with two bottles of cleaning solutions and a pile of rags, bright yellow rubber gloves went most of the up to his elbows, while Ducky checked the status of the first-aid cabinet's contents.

"If the current trend continues, we will definitely need to order more butterfly bandages; our supply is very nearly exhausted, Mr. Palmer," Ducky said as he marked something on his clipboard and returned the medium-sized white box with red lettering back to its place in the cupboard.

"We're almost out of x-ray film, too," Palmer replied, his voice echoing oddly from the back of the drawer he was scrubbing. "I noticed that a couple of weeks ago, but forgot to write it down."

"Slow day, Duck?" Gibbs asked from his place just inside the door.

"So it would seem," Ducky replied, making another mark on his supply-list and returning a box of individual packets of Tylenol to the cabinet. "Far be it for me to complain about the lack of meaningful work recently, but I do find myself growing rather bored with the current state of things."

"I know, Duck," Gibbs replied.

"And," the doctor continued, still checking the quantities of assorted whatnot from the cabinet, "I do recall you mentioning something to the effect that I would find something to do this morning when I arrived, yet on my arrival, I found Autopsy to be in precisely the same state it was when I left yesterday."

"I know, Duck."

"So I find myself, once again, without any real meaningful work. Now, I really am _not_ complaining, but there is only so much organizing and cleaning one can do," Ducky motioned in Jimmy's direction. "And Mr. Palmer here is getting to be far too efficient at his job for his normal duties to take all that long. Somehow, I don't see our director being all that happy on finding out he's paying us to sit around and talk all day."

"Ducky, I _know_," Gibbs said, maybe a little more sharply than he'd intended, but it managed to finally capture the doctor's attention.

"Good grief, Jethro," Ducky started to compose a quick chastisement on his friend's tone as he turned around, but changed tactics when he got a good look at him. "What happened?"

"Tony and Ziva's plane never arrived in Gallup last night," Gibbs stated. "There was a storm in their flight plan and the plane disappeared off radar, but we don't know what happened, exactly."

Ducky sat his clipboard on the counter, between a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a massive tube of Neosporin which was nearly empty. "You've checked with other airports?" he asked, before shaking his head. "Of course you have. And you're down here because you've got Timothy and Abigail tracking them down. Honestly, I'm surprised you're not up in Vance's office, convincing the man to allow you leave to go after your missing team members."

Gibbs managed a tight smile, "He won't be in for another hour, Duck."

"Well, there is that," Ducky allowed. After a few moments of companionable silence, Ducky said, "You do realize that if they crashed, there is less than a one-percent chance they survived."

"They survived," Gibbs' tone left no room for argument. "They've both beat the odds before."

Ducky nodded in agreement. "However, that's also a concern."

"Whadaya mean?"

"I am referring, of course, to Anthony's previous encounter with _Yersinia pestis_. The bacterium itself is native to most of the world's deserts; in fact, the plague pandemic which swept through Europe at the turn of the thirteenth century has been traced to two primary sources: the trade routes linking Europe with central Asia, and the rats unwittingly brought on-board the ships of crusaders returning from the last campaigns in the Middle East. Though it took several decades for the bacterium to gain a strong foothold in Europe, it did spread. By the time the pandemic reached its natural end, most estimates put the resultant death-toll at nearly sixty percent of the total population –"

"There a point to this history lesson, Duck?"

"Yes – simply that the vast majority of reported cases of plague, either in human or animal outbreaks, happen primarily in southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. And that is but one threat of the dozens of potential problems inherent in the wild places of this country's deserts. Another is the likelihood of snake bites – the region has numerous venomous species, including one of the world's most toxic, the coral snake. Also native to the area are several venomous spiders, scorpions, and so forth – though I will say that the vast majority of scorpions in the US only pose a danger if the person stung is very young or allergic to the insect's venom."

"When I was a kid," Palmer said as he wiggled backwards out of the drawer a few feet, the distinctive sound of a spray-bottle followed by the slightly squeaky noise of a rag polishing the steel tray punctuating his comment, "my cousin got bit by a brown recluse when on vacation in Corpus Christi. It didn't kill him, but the venom necrotizes the flesh around where it's injected and he wound up losing three of the fingers off his left hand before all was said and done."

_Why did I think this would be a good idea again?_ Gibbs thought. _Seriously, this isn't helping anything._ In fact, the mental pictures running through his brain at Palmer's little side-story were almost as alarming as the mental images he'd been trying like hell not to think on since seeing the little radar-blip on the information McGee had been able to scounge up disappear off the map.

* * *

"Hey, Ashton, wait a sec. Go back where you were a couple of seconds ago," Abby demanded. The Google Earth satellite had moved out of usable range, and so Ashton had managed to beg, borrow, or steal (he hadn't been too forthcoming with just _which_ it wound up being) a CIA bird two weeks from a scheduled maintenance-check.

"Back where?"

"To the…west. South a little more," Abby directed and Ashton complied. "A little more west. Okay, can you zoom in a bit more? I coulda swore I saw something."

"No problem, Abby," the NASA tech replied. "Hey, I think I see it, too. But…"

"Yeah," Abby agreed, staring at the large X of stones on the desert floor. "It's not where HAL said the crash would be." The supercomputer hadn't taken ten minutes to figure out that the weather information they had was incomplete – it was purely the storm's statistics at ground-level, the information regarding its upper levels hadn't been taken into consideration when Tim had completed his computerized recreation.

"Unless they were right at the dividing line," Ashton said, entering the possibility into HAL as he spoke. "See?" With a final few taps of his keyboard, an updated version of Tim's recreation began playing on the screen.

Abby watched in silence as the 3D animation showed the plane approaching the storm. When it was hit by an animated bolt of lightning, she gasped involuntarily. "What's HAL say the likelihood of this is?"

"Well, considering we're looking right at a ground-to-air call for medical help, I'd say it's pretty freakin' high, Abs."

"Not what I meant, Ash. I meant the lightning."

Ashton scrubbed a hand through his beard, "Well…lemme see…" He returned to HAL's keyboard and began typing. "Since we don't know what sort of shape their plane was in, we can't get it perfectly exact, but…HAL says it's better than a seventy-five percent chance."

* * *

**A/N2:** I know that current federal law prohibits the dispensing of _any _drugs from a work-based first aid kit, but the kit Ducky keeps on hand isn't exactly official (meaning he will keep what he pleases in it, and ignore any silly things like laws in so doing). Just thought I'd point that out before someone called me on it. I also made up Jimmy's cousin, just so y'all know.

1. To catch a butterfly (v) – to find the starting point for a series of seemingly random and chaotic events; to locate chaos' event horizon; to find that a formerly-unimportant bit of information is vital to the understanding of the whole; to discover that one is working with incomplete information. See also: Chaos Theory, The Butterfly Effect, and _A Sound of Thunder_. (Geek)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	10. It Had to Have Happened Sometime

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **I really need to stop working overtime at work – this woulda been writ a week ago, if not for the twelve-hour workdays I've been running.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Anyone ever tell you too much persistence can make you kind of stupid? – The Tracker, What Dreams May Come_

Once she'd gotten the coordinates of the X spotted though the satellite, Abby bid a hasty farewell to Ashton and sprinted for the elevator. "Come on, come on, can't this thing go any faster?" she grumbled as it ascended to the main level far too slowly for her taste. The elevator made an alarming pinging noise and groaned as it came to a shuddery halt, almost as though it had heard her and was protesting her impatience. "I'm sorry," Abby ran a tentative hand over the elevator wall, "no offense meant, of course." The doors slid open as the characteristic chime announced its arrival on the third floor.

_When was the last time that thing was serviced?_ Abby wondered, wasting no time in bolting out of the elevator and heading directly for Gibbs' desk. _'Course, it'd probably help if bossman didn't use it as his own personal office all the time; who knows what sort of wear and tear he's done to the brakes? _Her thoughts came to a screeching halt on seeing Gibbs' desk piled high with half-done forms, the trash can overflowing with paper cups, but no sign of the man himself. Reflexively, she turned to Tony's desk, only to be met with an empty chair that seemed as though it were trying to accuse her of something. She growled under her breath at her own silliness and spun around to face Tim.

Tim wasn't at his desk, either.

"Where did everyone go?" she muttered. _Maybe Timmy found something and wanted me to double-check it for him?_ She glanced at the elevator, watching as it spat out Agent Balboa (who gave the elevator a puzzled/concerned glare before heading to where his own team was slowly starting their day) and decided to take the stairs. _Just in case._

* * *

Almost as soon as the door to Autopsy slid shut behind him, Gibbs' cell phone rang. He flipped it open with a more-curt-than-usual bark of greeting.

"Whoa, someone switch the coffee to decaf or something?"

"Who is this?"

"Daniels, outta Gallup. Thought I'd give y'all a call, let you know what's what."

"You find them?" Gibbs didn't waste time in cutting straight to the most pertinent point.

The man on the other end of the line sighed, "Not yet. But that's why I'm calling. We're getting a search-party together – gonna meet up in Alamogordo 'round about two this afternoon to hash out some sort of plan. Be nice to know just how far we're gonna be searching."

"Their plane disappeared off radar somewhere over White Sands," Gibbs replied as he reached for the elevator button before recalling the fact that elevators and cell phones didn't mix well. He headed for the stairs instead.

"Damn," Daniels said. "That's a helluva lotta area to cover."

A woman spoke up in the background, "What's a helluva lotta area?"

"White Sands," Daniels said, obviously aiming the comment at the woman. "And watch the road, wouldja? Wouldn't do to spread ourselves all over I-40, now would it?"

"Shut the hell up, dick," the woman replied. "You're just pissed ya lost the coin-toss."

Daniels ignored the aside and refocused his attention on Gibbs. "You find out somethin' more specific than just 'somewhere over White Sands', lemme know."

The bickering on the other end of the line masked the sound of a door closing one level up from where Gibbs was. "How many people you think you can pull together for this?" Gibbs asked, not _quite_ able to keep his amusement out of his voice – _Either they've been partners for way too long, or they're family. No one else can bicker like that_.

"Got a full ten for-sures right now, and another six or seven maybes. Likely more as I get in touch with 'em. Since it ain't been a full twenty-four, this is all strictly volunteer, ya know."

"Keep me posted," Gibbs said before flipping the phone closed and returning it to his pocket. He practically sprinted up the remaining stairs to the third floor.

* * *

Abby stood in the doorway to her lab, unknowingly having missed Gibbs in the stairwell by mere seconds. "Where _is_ he?" she asked Bert. Bert simply stared at her.

* * *

Back up on the third floor, McGee managed to return to his desk after a brief stop by the bathroom a full minute before Gibbs returned. Before Gibbs could even ask, Tim simply met his gaze and shook his head. "Nothing new, boss," he said.

Gibbs opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted when his cell rang again. He flipped it open to answer, but the sound of Abby's over-caffeinated voice babbled through the line before he could say anything. "Gibbs!" she said. "Where _are_ you? I came up to your desk and you weren't there and Tim wasn't there and I think I've got something, but you didn't show up like you normally do when I've got something – actually, you usually show up before _I _know I've got something, so the fact that you weren't here when I found it is making me a little worried, and even more so now 'cause I went up to tell you and I think the elevator's on the verge of breaking down – do you know how much wear you've put on it's emergency brake over the years? Never mind, it's not important right now –"

"Be right down, Abs," Gibbs interjected. He snapped the phone closed and headed for the stairwell, keeping Abby's comment about the elevator in mind. He knew without having to look that McGee was right behind him.

Twenty minutes later, Tim was back at his desk, sorting through the dozens of ways available to get from DC to New Mexico while Gibbs paced Vance's outer office, waiting for the director to show up – Vance had been out all morning, dealing with the politics inherent to his position. Cynthia knew better by now than to try to get an obviously-agitated Gibbs to settle down, so she didn't even try. Likewise, she didn't call her boss to give him a heads-up, either; she knew he hated being interrupted when he was schmoozing the politicians. The fact that Vance had forgotten about her on Secretary's Day that past spring had nothing to do with it.

* * *

An hour and a half after Gibbs managed to waylay a three-minutes-late Vance on the way to his office, McGee finished apologizing profusely to his German shepherd. He checked his watch, muttered a curse, and sprinted for the check-in desk. Tim picked up his boarding pass, resettled his backpack on his shoulder, and went as fast as the crowds in the airport would let him. His badge got him around security in near-record time – though they still insisted in x-raying his pack – and he finally arrived at the appropriate gate just as the final boarding call sounded over the intercom.

Gibbs was waiting, just like Tim knew he'd be, as the rest of the passengers got into line ahead of him.

"You're late," was all he said.

Tim nodded, "I know. Stupid mutt hates the dog-carrier. Had to leave a trail of Reese's to get him to go into it." McGee left out the bit where he could have sworn he'd heard Tony making incessant _E.T._ comments to himself.

Gibbs and McGee found their seats with little trouble. The last-minute nature of their tickets had them stuck in the center row of seats. McGee was sandwiched between a businessman in a cheap polyester suit and a six year-old boy (the boy's mother was the next seat over, and her other child – a girl of roughly nine or ten – sat on her other side). Gibbs had marginally better luck with getting an aisle seat in the row behind McGee, but the teenaged girl next to him was looking inordinately green and had a white-knuckle grip on both armrests.

Tim waited, rather impatiently, through the emergency presentation (_What sort of moron doesn't understand how a seatbelt works?_) and take-off before removing his laptop from its place in his backpack. He connected it to the satellite phone Gibbs had requisitioned for him before leaving NCIS and started working. The businessman next to him eyed the technology with a greedy eye before pulling out his own cell phone. A passing flight attendant made the businessman put it away. When the businessman tried to argue with her, she simply explained that McGee was a federal agent. Tim had no idea what strings Gibbs had pulled to be allowed this minor bending of normal in-flight rules, but he wasn't about to complain. He merely continued working, albeit with a slight smirk.

_With luck_, he thought, _we just might be able to find Lieutenant Brussman and Arnette while we're in New Mexico. It'd make Vance a little happier about sending all of us out that way._

By the time the flight reached Atlanta, McGee had managed to trace Maxwell Arnette's AmEx card to a hotel in Albuquerque. The cash stolen from the Comptroller's office, however, had yet to 'land' anywhere.

During their six-hour layover in Atlanta, McGee and Gibbs managed to snag some food. Tim took his dog for a long walk – more to wake himself up than to provide the beast any real exercise – and once checked back in, tried to catch a nap. Unlike his boss, however, Tim couldn't sleep just anywhere. Giving up on sleep for the moment, he called Abby. She emailed him a collection of photos taken with the borrowed satellite that confirmed the location of the giant X in the desert as the same place Tony and Ziva were currently stranded.

The flight from Atlanta to El Paso was little more than half-full, and as such Gibbs and McGee had slightly better luck in seating arrangements. They were on the left-hand row, with Gibbs claiming the aisle seat and Tim stuck in the middle. A girl in her early twenties with short green hair done up in dozens of miniature pig-tails and with enough metal piercing her face to have likely caused herself a significant delay in getting through security had the window seat; she spent the entire flight plugged into her iPod and reading a battered copy of Stephen King's _Skeleton Crew_.

Ten minutes prior to their scheduled arrival time, the pilot announced their imminent arrival in El Paso, where the air temperature was hovering at one-ten, with twelve percent humidity, and a strengthening wind out of the west at fifteen to twenty miles per hour.

Once the plane landed, Gibbs went after their rental and Tim reclaimed his canine luggage, much to the dog's delight. He met up with his boss as they'd arranged and Tim collapsed the dog-carrier and stashed in the back of the SUV. The dog happily stretched out over the back seat.

And then it was back to business. Tim used his regular phone to pull up the driving directions while Gibbs navigated out of the airport and onto Airport Road. Ongoing construction choked traffic sufficiently enough that Gibbs was cursing under his breath at not being able to go as fast as he'd like. The construction continued as they turned left onto Fred Wilson Drive. At long last, they were able to merge onto US 54.

About three miles after they'd left the 'Welcome to New Mexico' sign behind them, a set of red-and-blue flashers showed up in the rear-view. _I suppose it had to have happened sometime,_ Tim thought as he got his NCIS ID out of his pocket while Gibbs slowed to a stop on the sandy shoulder. He peered through the side-mirror and blinked in amusement. _Never been pulled over by a pickup truck before_. The truck was painted in a classic white-on-black police pattern, complete with 'State Police' in mirror-writing across the front in gold letters.

The officer climbed out of the vehicle and approached Gibbs' window with a standard-issue serious-face expression. Wordlessly, Gibbs rolled down his window and handed over his own NCIS ID – the officer read it and handed it back with a light smile. "You're after those two who didn't make it to Gallup, ain't ya?"

Gibbs nodded, "How'd you hear of that?"

"Kara Daniels. She's been rounding up folk to go lookin' for 'em."

"Any relation to an Officer Daniels in Gallup?"

"That's her brother. Entire family's in law enforcement. Their baby brother's a sheriff in Arizona, dad's a retired MP outta Fort Bliss, an' their mom's still one of the dispatchers for the Boarder Patrol. Speakin' of, I'll radio ahead to the boarder-check up the road so you can go around it."

"Thanks," Gibbs said, returning his ID to his pocket.

"But," the officer said, "fed or not, try to keep the speed down to the double-digits, okay?"

"I can do that," Gibbs replied. Tim could practically hear his boss's thought that 'ninety-nine was double-digits' and surreptitiously tightened his seatbelt.

The officer waved them off.

Twenty minutes later the officer proved to be a man of his word as the boarder patrol station waved them through the checkpoint without bothering to have them do much more than slow down through the station.

Back at speed on the highway, Tim fell into a strange trancelike state staring out at the landscape. Eyes accustomed to seeing forests and grass, eyes that had grown up with the green hills of the American Midwest were unused to the strangeness of the desert. _There's more plant-life than I'd thought there would be,_ he thought. Shrubs carpeted the beige dirt, pock-marked here and there with stands of smallish cacti and plants that McGee hesitated to put names to. The mountains lining the horizons in all directions simultaneously made him feel both small and closed-off from the rest of the world, despite the fact that he could see further distances at ground level than he could recall at any other time in his life. After spending a full five minutes trying to figure out if the lone mountain peak poking up off to the left was close enough to hike to, he gave up. _I don't envy Tony or Ziva being stuck out there._

Though it seemed strange to him, he could admit that the desert did have a sense of beauty about it – but it was a type of beauty he would much rather admire from the safety and comfort of his own living room.

He only managed to shake the trancelike state off when Gibbs pulled to a stop at a Super 8 motel on the outskirts of Alamogordo. After claiming a double room, Gibbs ordered him to get some sleep. It was one order he had no intention (or ability) to deny. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow. His dog took up three-quarters of the bed, but Tim didn't notice – he was used to it.

* * *

While McGee got caught up on some much-needed rest, Gibbs called Daniels' cell phone. He found that the search-and-rescue volunteers were meeting at a greasy-spoon diner only a few blocks from the Super 8 that evening. The news that he had an exact location to start their search was met with good cheer, but Daniels' news that the weather was rapidly worsening was most definitely not.

"How bad's it gonna get?" Gibbs asked.

"They're sayin' gusts up to ninety, with steady winds at around fifty. No precip called for, thank god," Daniels replied. "But a hard blow like this is gonna be is gonna make things all the harder."

"Any chance we could get to them and get back before it gets that bad?"

"No. We might make it out there in one piece, but ain't no tellin' how long it'll be before the winds start up hard'n'fast. Ain't none of us would wanna be out on horseback with winds much stronger than they are now – an' the chopper pilot we tracked down ain't about to risk his bird flyin' in wind like that."

Gibbs couldn't argue with the logic. It didn't mean he was happy with the situation, but he couldn't fault the pilot for the weather. "Understood. We'll meet up with everyone at that diner later."

"See ya then," Daniels replied.

Gibbs returned his phone to its normal place in his pocket and stared out at the mountains lining the western horizon. A strong breeze ruffled through his short hair and carried small particles of grit that stung his eyes. A casual observer would have wondered why he was glaring at the weather, particularly since it was a beautifully blue-sky-and-sunshine sort of day, but no one was around to see.

Several minutes later, Gibbs blinked and entered the motel. For all he'd napped at the airport in Atlanta, he was still short on sleep, and could do with a bit more rest before meeting up with the volunteers later that evening.

* * *

**A/N2:** Did Cynthia (Jenny's secretary) stick around after Vance was made director? I can't recall…so, I kept her – if this ain't right, please lemme know, yeah? And the next chapter shall bring us back to Lizzie, Tony, and Ziva.

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	11. Bright Pink Duct Tape

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **All good assassins – particularly those who can kill with a paperclip – are bound to be more schooled than the usual person in the details of human anatomy.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Invention__, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple. –Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (original)_

"Yeah," Lizzie said, her voice carrying easily over the moaning of the ever-increasing wind outside, "prickly-pear musta been designed by a psychotic ten year-old. Who else'd think to take a fruit what tastes somethin' like bubblegum and watermelon an' stick it inside thorns? Kinda like how my dad always claimed that pineapple was designed by a mother-in-law – all bristly an fulla stickers on the outside, but once ya get past that skin, all sweetness and caged sunlight." She chuckled a little, "Hafta say that Grammie Harris never appreciated the comparison none."

Tony echoed her laugh. "I can see why. Still, though," he managed to slice open another of the smallish fruits, "I hafta say it isn't too bad; better than I would've thought just from looking at it." He was starting to get good at opening the fruits – he actually managed to skin it without gouging himself on the thorns for a change.

Ziva shrugged a little. "It is okay, I suppose, but I still prefer mango. How long, do you think, will the wind continue like this?" She was getting impatient with the situation. Had she been on her own, she could have easily hiked out of the valley and managed to find someway back to civilization – she'd noticed that _no_ place in the US was all that isolated; walk far enough in any one direction and she was bound to hit a road or a line of power-poles or something similar that would lead her to a town. But she wasn't on her own – she had not only her injured partner to worry about, but a civilian, too. It didn't matter that Cambry seemed to be at ease in their surroundings, she can't have had near the level of survival training that Ziva had undergone.

Elizabeth cast a long look over her shoulder at where the carcass of her plane, braced in place with numerous rocks hauled in from outside, blocked most of the cave entrance. The gaps between stones and the twisted metal were dark; the sun had set about an hour earlier. "No way to say for sure, not without a linkup to a weather station, but I will say I ain't never seen it blow like this for more than a few hours at a stretch. Gusts have gotta be gettin' close on to ninety, ninety-five or so. I'm thinkin' that once it calms down some, we might wanna see about headin' for the highway. Be a damn sight easier on us all if we trek it at night than if we were to wait for daylight."

Tony slurped down the last bit of juicy prickly-pear fruit he'd been munching. He felt pretty good, for a change. Sure, he still ached, and his knee gave him a screaming tantrum almost every time he shifted his position, but that _damn song_ had finally stopped looping and his mind was back to being firmly tethered within his skull. And with the fruit's help, he didn't even feel thirsty any more. Unfortunately, the pile of rubble blocking the cave entrance wasn't at all airtight and so there was a thick haze of combined smoke and dust hovering in the air that made his throat tickle in a way he'd long since come to hate. _On the other hand, though, we did all manage to not only survive the crash, but none of us are even hurt all that bad._

Ziva moved her eyes from the pile of whatnot blocking most of the cave entrance to the pilot. "Are you certain that is wise? Surely, light is of more use to us than lower temperatures."

Liz shook her head, "Naw. I don't know 'bout you, but I got – to borrow Hok'ee's words – 'scary-good' night-vision; I can read a newspaper by starlight. 'Sides, I still got my Maglite, an' I don't think it'd be that great of an idea for the łigaii hastiin here ta be out in the full light of day – the sun don't seem to like him much." (1)

The teasingly insulting tone used on the unfamiliar phrase had Tony narrowing his eyes at Lizzie. "What did you just call me?"

"Nothing bad, Áłtsé Hashké, just 'white man', and not even one of the derogatory phrases," Elizabeth replied.

"Is that not a case of the pan – no," Ziva interrupted herself, "I know this one – the…the pot calling the kettle black?"

"Not really," Cambry replied. "Just 'cause Mom's Irish won out don't mean I'm full-white, chica. My dad was a quarter Navajo."

Tony let out a little huff of amusement, more at Lizzie's pale complexion – she was whiter than he was – than at Ziva's determination to get an idiom right. "So," he said, "that would've made your great-grandpa full Navajo?"

Liz nodded. "Yep. He was a Windtalker in World War Two." She smiled somewhat ruefully at her befreckled arms. "I got the no-sunburn thing from that side of the family, but I still don't tan none, just break out in freckles. I keep hopin' what with enough exposure, maybe the freckles'll all merge into one big one, but it ain't happened yet."

"So you are half-Irish?" Ziva asked.

Lizzie shook her head, "No, not really. I'm pretty much an all-American mutt. Had ta do a report on my family history back in high school. Found out that aside from the Navajo, there's equal bits of Irish, Welsh, German, French, and Greek in the tree. Also found out that nobody knows where our last name surfaced – just showed up in Montana at the close of the 1890s with Jared Cambry, who'd come down outta Canada."

Their conversation drifted organically through family history and lineage, lit briefly on the weather several times – rather like a skeptical bumblebee when faced with an unfamiliar bloom – before dancing across travel, language, and food. Eventually, right around midnight, the three survivors managed to find themselves in a good-natured argument on whose job was more dangerous, the pilot's or the federal agents, based solely on the type and number of injuries sustained. They hadn't quite gotten to the point of comparing scars – and with no alcohol available, that possibility was less than likely – when Tony noticed something. Actually, it wasn't _noticing_ something, so much as realizing that something was missing.

"Hey, do you hear that?" he said.

"What?" Ziva asked, interrupting Liz's tale of six broken ribs and a dislocated thumb.

Lizzie grinned brightly, the firelight glinting off her teeth. "The wind's died down. Can pro'ly leave the cave and not get sandblasted now." She sprang to her feet and went to the pile of rubble. Peering through a gap in the 'wall' she and Ziva had erected earlier that evening, she waited patiently for her eyesight to adjust.

Lit by a sky filled with more stars than seemed possible and a just-past-half-full moon, Elizabeth saw that the desert had already smoothed over what damage the crashing airplane had done to the landscape. The rough edges of the gouge bisecting the small valley had worn away making it look like nothing more than yet another runoff ditch for the heavy rains seen during monsoon season. The 'X' she'd laid out that morning was partially drifted over by blown sand and partially obscured by a couple of uprooted sage plants. She checked her watch and found that it was just past ten-thirty.

Had Elizabeth been alone, she knew she could have made it to Highway 54 in about three hours or so, and caught a ride down to El Paso and been enjoying her cousin's wife's machaca burritas smothered in asadero by the time said cousin had to get up for work at four. But she _wasn't _on her own – she had a fellow desert-rat and Áłtsé Hashké to worry about, and neither of them were in the best of shape. (2)

"What's the verdict?" Tony asked, startling Liz out of her thoughts.

The pilot turned around and grinned, "Winds are down, pro'ly to around thirty or so. Still not what y'all would consider _calm_, but calm enough for now. I figure we can head out in a coupla hours or so."

"Why not leave now?" this time, the question came from Ziva.

Liz's perpetual grin landed on the Mossad officer. "Because, amiga, I don't wanna carry Áłtsé Hashké, an' I doubt you do, either. 'Sides, I'm sure he'd rather have the braggin' rights ta havin' walked out himself, yeah?"

Tony looked from Liz to his injured knee – which was sporting a disturbing pallet of dark blues and purples and had swollen to twice the size of its twin – and back. Unlike Ziva's and Liz's thoughts from earlier, he _knew_ he didn't have a chance in hell on hiking out by himself. "Not that I'm disagreeing here, but just how do you plan on that?"

"By followin' Mom's favorite sayin' about duct tape – 'There is no problem too big or too small that cannot be solved by the proper application of an appropriate amount of either duct tape or high explosive.'" Liz waggled her eyebrows at her companions. "An' since I ain't in the habit of keepin' boomy things on my person, it'll have ta be duct tape."

"You carry duct tape with you?" Tony choked back the urge to laugh; this small revelation, though amusing, was not surprising in the least.

Lizzie nodded decisively, "Damn skippy I do."

Though Ziva was well-acquainted with the myriad uses of the dull silvery tape, she wasn't precisely sure what Elizabeth was getting at. "How will tape help us?"

"Well, it ain't gonna do it on its lonesome, but just like how it ain't pizza without the cheese, the plan can't work without the tape," Liz explained as she turned back to the pile of rubble blocking the exit. She climbed into the remains of the airplane and rummaged through the deep pocket on the back of the pilot's chair. "I figure with this," she held up a thick spool of duct tape (bright _pink_ duct tape, no less), "an' a stick of ocotillo an' that knife of yours, we just might have enough shit lyin' around here ta make it work."

* * *

By the time Elizabeth's watch read two in the morning, not only had a plan been made, but nearly all preparations had been completed.

While Liz went out searching for a suitable length of ocotillo, Ziva'd been busy stripping the cloth and stuffing from the airplane seats and dulling her knife by cutting through the thin aluminum of its battered hull. When Lizzie got back with a _very_ thorny length of dried, spindly cactus, all the rest of the pieces were gathered together.

After learning that he had his own knife with him, Liz set Tony to stripping the thorns off of the inordinately hard length of ocotillo – the stick itself was about two inches thick at the base, narrowing to about an inch thick at the end; its lower third was perfectly straight, but it wavered back and forth somewhat for a further three feet before making a graceful bend/swoop. Though it was about three feet too tall, and that bend/swoop part was almost comically long, the toughness of the dried-out cactus was enough to convince Tony that it would do as a temporary crutch.

While he worked on the thorns, Lizzie and Ziva managed to come up with an odd sort of contraption by combining Ziva's knowledge of anatomy and the innumerable times Liz had wound up injured. Long, narrow strips of the aluminum were beaten relatively flat with the help of a couple of rocks and taped into place perpendicular to smaller strips of the gray fabric from the airplane seats. Knowing that duct tape doesn't get along all that well with fabric on its own, Liz used one of the thicker thorns off of an unburned mesquite branch as an awl to sew the tape and fabric together; for thread, she took a length of the bright pink tape and tore it in half lengthwise before folding it, sticky-to-sticky, also lengthwise.

After the thorns were disposed of off of the ocotillo branch, Ziva helped Tony to his feet. Using his partner to balance, he held the branch to one side and Liz used his knife to mark where it needed trimmed down. Using the left-over length from the 'swoop' to brace that portion of the stick, Liz then wrapped the entire thing in a layer of tape. The 'swoop' at the top also got a thick layer of the foam rubber padding out of the seats from the airplane.

The color may not have been to his liking – at _all_, to be truthful – but damn if the DIY knee brace and crutch didn't work. Tony still had to use one or the other of the girls to help keep his balance, but he was up and vertical. Yeah, it hurt, but nowhere near the level it would've without the extra support.

The trio left the cave behind at two-thirty in the morning, after Liz took the time to rearrange her 'X' of stones into an arrow pointing east. Ziva carried Liz's flashlight while keeping pace with Tony. DiNozzo kept his left hand on her shoulder for balance and his eyes on the patch of ground directly in front of him – the absolute last thing he needed was to drop the crutch or his good leg down a prairie dog burrow. Elizabeth kept ahead of them by a good ten to fifteen feet, just to make sure the flashlight wouldn't inadvertently ruin her night-vision.

It was slow going, but they managed to make it out of the valley in about an hour.

* * *

Light pink stained the eastern horizon when Liz called time for a break. Scavenged prickly-pears slaked thirst easily enough, but didn't do much to stifle the growing hunger all three were feeling. However, for the last forty minutes or so, before the approaching daylight had begun to interfere, they'd been able to see headlights in the distance.

After nearly getting his head bit off for asking if that was the highway they were aiming for, Tony kept his mouth shut. Now that there was a little more light available, he could see that Elizabeth was frowning. Not just a regular frown, but a jaw-clenching, forehead-wrinkling, nearly-a-scowl kind of frown. As he watched, he saw her yawn four times, without opening her mouth, and was on the verge of asking if there was something they needed to worry about when she answered it before he could even take a moment to form the words.

"I think I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now."

Tony's memory flashed back to the half-full pot of coffee he'd spotted in the hangar two days earlier. _Has it really only been two days? Feels like it's been weeks._ However, knowing that only insanity or a really _big_ caffeine addiction would lead someone to drinking coffee when it was a hundred-plus degrees out managed to put the pieces together. _I bet she's got a bitch of a headache right now._ He resolved to try to stay on her good side. Besides, he was used to dealing with a caffeine-addict. The only difference here was that while Gibbs could fire him, Liz could simply leave them behind if she got pissed-off enough.

The break, though necessary, had the unfortunate side-effect of making Tony's leg stiffen up. He refused to complain, however. Not until there was something resembling A/C surrounding him and a hot shower with a solid meal in his immediate future. As the three of them continued their agonizingly slow pace across the desert, weaving around prickly-pear and ocotillo cactus, mesquite trees, yucca plants, sagebrush, and patches of surprisingly thick grass, the sun peaked over the mountains far to the east and began its trek across a cloudless blue sky.

The wind had died down to a light breeze that kept the air from feeling stale and swiftly dried sweat, making the morning feel far cooler than the previous two had been.

Almost imperceptibly, the line in the distance that marked US54 marched closer and closer.

At a quarter past eight, an unusual sound caught the attention of first Tony, then Liz and Ziva.

As one, they turned and faced north.

Bit by bit, the noise became clearer and clearer.

Liz saw it first and grimaced – her pulse rate sped up and old, old memories flashed through her mind. She stooped and swept up a dusty beige rock that was slightly larger than her fist.

Tony caught sight of it next, and he squinted slightly, half-convinced he was hallucinating. He realized he wasn't when Ziva said something in Hebrew that he was pretty sure wasn't nice.

"Isn't that…?" he muttered.

"I believe so," Ziva replied.

"But…" By now, the distant speck had tripled in size and the noise was easily identifiable, though still somewhat distant. "How the _hell_…?"

The quiet exchange of words went unheard by Liz. All she could see was another instance of that fucking thing that had given her her very first scar. It really wasn't her fault she'd never grown to like the damn things – she'd only been five, after all.

Still puzzling over the creature rapidly approaching them, Tony glanced over at the pilot. He saw the white-knuckle grip she had on the rock and smirked a little. _So much for her being fearless._ "Suppose there's one way to tell for sure," he said.

"And how is that?" Ziva asked.

Tony raised his hand to his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The dog put on a fresh burst of speed.

When he all but skidded to a halt in a self-made cloud of dust at Ziva's feet, there left no room for doubt in either of their minds. Ziva smiled at the wriggling mass of wagging tail and puppy-like yips coming from the big dog. Tony shook his head a little, smiling more at the thought that this meant that Probie was out there somewhere, most likely alongside Gibbs, and looking for them than at the antics of the German shepherd.

"You know that dog?" Liz managed to break through the heart-stopping panic.

Tony nodded, "Yeah, he belongs to our partner."

The corner of Liz's right eye twitched as she eyed the dog. "Keep it away from me."

DiNozzo nodded, noticing how she didn't let go of the rock at all, and had to wonder just why she was so freaked-out about a _dog_. He refocused his gaze to looking back the way Jethro had come, hoping to see a Jeep or a couple of four-wheelers – _Hell, I'd even take _horses_ at this point!_ – in the distance.

He was disappointed and it showed on his face. "So now what do we do?" he asked no one in particular.

Lizzie didn't hesitate in answering, "We keep on goin' like we been doin' all mornin'. We should make it to the highway by ten or eleven. You just keep that fuckin' mutt away from me."

* * *

**A/N2:** This story's rapidly coming to a close – from my notes, I expect two more chapters.

1. łigaii hastiin - white man (Navajo – literal translation)  
2. Machaca burritas are a type of dried-beef burrito-style dish and asadero is a smooth white cheese that lacks the sharpness of Swiss or provolone but isn't as stringy when melted as mozzarella – both these food items are common to the Chihuahua area of Mexico (even spilling over in abundance from Juárez into the El Paso area). I highly recommend them.

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	12. For the Squirrels

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **I feel like I should apologize – this was supposed to be out almost two weeks ago, but to celebrate coming to the end of the 12-hour-shifts-from-hell, I bought _The Sims 3_ and…well, let's just say I can now sing most of the songs on their 'pop' radio station.

Oh, and If you didn't know already, the German shepherd that Tim wound up with was originally named 'Butch'.

This chapter catches the Gibbs/McGee timeline up to where I left off with Tony, Ziva, and Lizzie.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_There's no right, there's no wrong, there's only popular opinion. – Jeffery Goines, Twelve Monkeys_

Batilda's was the sort of small diner once found in every town prior to the explosion of the fast-food industry; the sort of place that had unending coffee and traditional American artery-clogging fare like chicken-fried steak and country sausage and biscuits that were eaten at a collection of mismatched tables with vinyl-upholstered chairs patched with clear packing tape. The décor was uninspired – the prevailing theme seemed to be chickens and roosters – and the food was unlikely to win any awards, but it was filling and the coffee was hot (not to mention free for law enforcement personnel).

Though the original plan had been for the S&R party to meet up that afternoon, the helicopter pilot, Mike Maberry, hadn't been able to get away until that evening, so the meeting had been pushed back a few hours. By the time Gibbs and McGee had arrived, nearly everyone else was already there; discounting the family of five seated at a corner table and an older guy in a leather jacket who was all but attacking a massive platter of steak'n'eggs over at the counter, there were fifteen people present. Most of the diner's worn tables had been pushed together in the middle of the dining area and the diner's two waitresses – one was a teenaged girl with frizzy brown hair and braces, the other was a career-waitress type who could have probably retired five years earlier had she been in any other profession – buzzed around the gathered crowd refilling coffee mugs and taking orders.

Conversation among the group was loud and cheerful, split into groups of two or three, and the people themselves were a varied bunch. Though most were men, there were four women in the crew – one obviously some sort of nurse or other medical professional who'd probably come straight to the diner from work as she was still wearing a set of scrubs (printed with teddy bears) and another one which didn't fail to catch Gibbs' eye, and not just because she had long auburn hair.

The man seated next to her had hair the same shade of red, with identical streaks of gray at the temples, and had looked up when the bell over the diner door jangled. He said something inaudible to the woman, who nodded without breaking her conversation with the guy on her other side, before standing. He walked over to Gibbs and McGee before the waitresses could get there, snagging a fresh mug of coffee off of the teen's serving tray as he passed her. "Agent Gibbs, I assume?" he said, holding out the mug of steaming caffeine.

Gibbs nodded as he took the coffee. _Yeah, Daniels is definitely one of the few local LEOs with their heads screwed on straight._

A brief round of introductions later and then it was down to business.

* * *

Butch yawned and stretched. A quick shake from nose to tail finished his wakeup routine. Sniffing around, he caught smells of laundry detergent, a barrage of feet-stench that no amount of vacuuming would ever erase, his current human, and…yes, there it was – a bowl of kibble. Set up in a corner of the bathroom, next to a bowl of water and a layer of newsprint. Though he had no idea where his human had run off to, he was sure the man would be back soon – he was just grateful that this time, he wasn't going to that doggie-prison. The Saint Bernard there had a serious attitude problem.

Daintily picking his kibble out of the bowl one piece at a time, Butch wished yet again that humans understood dog – he had a few gripes that needed addressed. _First off, human, my name is _Butch_, not Jethro. I understand it wasn't your idea to re-name me, but damn it, man, grow a backbone! That girl had no right to start calling me something else. If I could talk so she could understand me, I'm sure she wouldn't like it much if I randomly started calling her something other than her name. Secondly, human, though I appreciate you letting me sleep on your bed; you snore. I'd much rather have my own bed. I'd settle for a couch, though. Why don't you have a couch? I thought those were as essential to humans as a thick coat is for me? _Butch huffed and shook his head. _Whatever. Thirdly, please stop buying the knockoff kibble. It tastes like ass – and I should know. I miss the kibble that I used to get before my former human took me from the training grounds. Speaking of trainers, human, find me a different personal trainer. The one you have coming by now is a total feline, you realize. She's managed to make off with a bunch of those little foldable whatevers you keep in the drawer on your desk – the ones you sometimes trade for sweet'n'sour pork or pizza. There's a different trainer that lives in our building. She's owned by that cute little bitch with the mixed heritage, but I won't hold that against her. Some of the best of us are mixed. Anyway, the trainer. She always smells like food – I think you'd like her. You need a bitch of your own. I'm sure if you had one, I'd have a sofa and decent kibble._

_You know,_ he finished his dinner and leaped back onto his human's bed, _I thought retirement would be different._ He sighed and wondered if this new place his human was sleeping had one of those chew-toys that would turn on the television.

* * *

The meeting at Batilda's went well. Though the Daniels siblings had nominal control over the group by virtue of knowing both the area and the people, Kara and Maury had made it a point to clear everything with Gibbs before finalizing any of the plans – it was his people, after all, who were missing.

Kara and Maury's uncle Max – a retired Alamogordo city cop who now bred horses – agreed to loan the search team a half-dozen of his saddle-mares to assist in the search. Hok'ee Whitetail, who'd showed up roughly a half-hour after McGee and Gibbs, made some calls and rounded out the ground crew's transportation with another half-dozen horses and some dirtbikes.

The group agreed to split into five groups: three teams of four on horseback, one team on dirtbikes, and the helicopter. The only surprise showed up as they determined who would be on each team; Tim actually _volunteered_ for the dirtbike group. When Gibbs heard that, he leveled an odd look at his agent, who simply replied with a small smile. It wasn't often that Tim could surprise his boss, and he enjoyed it every time it happened. _Who would've thought it back then that all the hours Jory and me wasted out at the lake on his bikes when we were fifteen would wind up being useful now?_

Gibbs himself would be riding in the helicopter and coordinating the teams on the ground.

With the assorted minutiae addressed, everyone agreed to meet up at 0700 the next morning at Max Daniels' ranch twenty minutes south of Alamogordo on US 54.

On returning to their motel room, Tim took the time to take Jethro out for a walk – and was it his imagination or was the dog a little more disapproving than usual? – while Gibbs helped himself to the shower. After McGee returned, Gibbs managed to get the full story out of his underling about the summer between his junior and senior years in high school, of the time wasted burning gas and cutting paths through the forest surrounding the small lake near where the McGees had lived that year; a month into Tim's senior year, his dad had gotten transferred from Illinois to South Carolina.

Though he'd never admit as much, Gibbs often forgot that Tim was with NCIS and not the FBI simply because his dad was Navy – it wasn't like McGee spent a whole lot of time talking about his family. _Seems to be a running theme with my team,_ Gibbs thought, just before sleep claimed him that night. _DiNozzo doesn't really talk much about his family, either. And Ziva's family…well, the less said there, the better._

* * *

Tiny bursts of almost-unheard mumblings from his human punctuated the ever-louder roaring of the wind outside. Butch paced between the doorways marking the bathroom and the exit; his own high-pitched whine of worry at the weather likewise inaudible over the steady white-noise of the raging dust storm – the only real highlight of the night was that his human wasn't snoring for a change.

_I hope we go home soon. Couch or no couch, I'll take the damn clacking of that paper-eater over this any day! _

A particularly strong burst of wind rattled the sturdy door in its frame. Butch eyed it warily, his ears flat against his skull. As a result, the German shepherd didn't notice the odd pinging of sand off of metal, or the gong-like noise of a larger bit of debris ricocheting off of the metal trashcan lid to which the wind had loaned a portion of its momentum.

He couldn't fail to miss the splintery crash as that lid bounced its way through the large picture window, though, and if he hadn't had to protect his eyes from the sudden influx of sand and dust, he might actually have let out a chuffing woof of dog-laughter; his human and the other one came-to with the same abrupt suddenness of that _damn cat_ from the apartment next to the laundry room when he barked at it. All that was missing was the poofed-out tail.

While the humans shouted at one another over the wind, Butch crawled on his belly and nosed under the bed, only to be forced to a halt with only half his snout protected from the flying dust. _Mouse-eating son-of-a-feline! Who designs beds you can't hide under? _Butch growled in frustration.

Sudden light stung his eyes as badly as the sand. Papers, trash, and dirt were cycloning around the room, while the curtains tried valiantly to join the dance. _This is going to take forever to clean up,_ Butch couldn't help but be grateful he didn't have thumbs or else he was sure he'd have to help.

He sneezed rapidly three times in quick succession. _This is for the squirrels – I'm outta here!_

Taking a running leap, he bounded out the broken window. _There's gotta be some place I can hole up._

It didn't take long for him to find a nicely sheltered spot that blocked almost all the wind. He curled into a tight little ball, covered his nose with his tail, and decided to worry about the weather tomorrow.

Too bad he didn't realize that his hidey-hole was gap in a load of firewood loaded on a trailer, bound for La Luz.

* * *

The mess in the hotel room didn't take too long to sort out – the night manager simply moved them to a new room – however Tim couldn't get back to sleep no matter how many times Gibbs assured him that Jethro would come back on his own. It didn't help matters any that every time he was just about to drift off, he would hear the phantom sound of glass breaking and startle awake once again.

McGee glared at his boss, seemingly dead to the world on the other bed in the room and sighed. _It's going to be a _long_ night._

* * *

The wind eventually died down, and Butch slipped a little further into real sleep – that odd place where there were unlimited squirrels to torment and no one even knew what a _cat_ was. He was just about to crunch down on a particularly swift little squirrel whose tail was longer than he was when an unfamiliar garble of sound woke him up.

"¿Qué es eso?" (1)

The voice switched to a deeper tone, "Creo que esta un perro." (2)

The first voice spoke again, and Butch felt a light jab in his ribs. "¿Qué está haciendo en nuestra leña?" (3)

Butch uncoiled himself and growled lightly at the child who'd poked him with a short length of pine. It was only a _warning_ growl – he didn't even have his hackles raised, his teeth bared, or even his ears the tiniest bit back-facing – but the man with the kid completely overreacted and started shouting more of the incomprehensible gibberish at him, backing away with a tight grip on the boy's shoulder as he did so.

Even though Butch couldn't understand the words the man was shouting, he knew the tone well enough – and even if he hadn't, it was a little hard to miss the meaning behind the small stones the man had scooped up. As one small pebble bounced harmlessly off a split log, Butch sniffed and leapt off the trailer. _As though I'd be intimidated by the likes of you, silly man. I've been shot before. Can you say the same?_ He made the dog-equivalent of a harrumph and trotted merrily away from the man and his son.

It wasn't until he'd reached a small outbuilding that Butch realized that he was no longer anywhere near the human-kennel where he'd started his nap. He flopped down and considered his options after swallowing down a whine. _I'm not some clueless pup just off the teat. There's no use whining – it doesn't change anything and usually makes someone swat your nose. Now, come on old man. Think._

He took in a deep breath. Something slightly familiar pinged against his brain. _Wait just one cat-eaten moment, I know that scent!_ Laced in among the smells of tar and diesel and oil and gas and dust and plants and a million other little shades and nuances of olfactory information was one particular combination – a sort of blended citrus/sandalwood/honey scent that Butch knew well enough to know that delightful little tidbits of home-cooked meat usually came with it. He got back to his feet and pointed his highly-trained nose in the direction of the scent.

Eventually, he found it. A small scrap of battered canvas fluttered against the side of the building. The sandalwood smell was almost overpowering on it, but it still possessed the faint tones of citrus and honey that made the Giver-of-Treats scent unique.

He set about back-tracking the path that scrap of canvas had taken across the desert.

* * *

An hour or so before even the faintest hint of dawn stained the eastern horizon, Tim gave up on sleep, so he quietly got dressed and headed towards the Dunkin' Donuts that was only a few blocks away.

He found himself marveling at the fact that, their own broken hotel window aside, there was surprisingly little evidence of the ferocity of the wind of the night before. It made him realize that the windstorm was as likely a common occurrence _here_ as rain showers were back in DC.

After a reassuringly long wait – fresh donuts had a habit of pulling even the laziest out of bed early from time to time – Tim ordered a half-dozen and coffee and headed back to the hotel. He wished, yet again, that either of his partners' cell phones was working. _Maybe we'll find them quickly, then I can go look for my dog. Too bad Jethro can't take a cell with him… Hang on a dang minute there, Timothy. He _does_ have a tracking-chip! All working dogs do – especially police or military animals. _

He paused next to a house whose architectural styling was more suited to New England than New Mexico, but that still sported the native stone wall surrounding the yard that seemed to be the rule rather than the exception in the area. He sat the drink-carrier on the wall's chest-high ledge and pulled out his own cell. He hit speed-dial five and waited.

Half a continent away, Abby was just finishing up breakfast. "Scutio's House of Specters, Spirits, and Sprites. How may I direct your call?"

Tim let out an amused snorfle. "Hey, Abby. I was hoping you could do me a favor."

"Timmy! Have you found Tony and Ziva yet? And are they okay? Ducky told me how the plague germs are native down there and how there's all these spiders and snakes and scorpions and all those other critters that can hurt you without really meaning to just because you're in their space and it made me have weird dreams all night last night – I managed to fall out of my coffin!"

When Abby paused to take a breath, Tim interrupted. "Abby! Slow down and breathe! No, we haven't found Tony or Ziva yet, but we couldn't start looking until today." He went on to describe the windstorm and how it had landed a metal trashcan lid in the hotel room. He mentally braced himself for the storm of Abby-lashing (something related to, yet wholly different than a normal tongue-lashing) and concluded his story with, "And then Jethro jumped out the broken window. I haven't seen him since."

He was already wincing when Abby managed to surprise him yet again. Instead of going off on a tirade on proper pet care, she made a disturbingly high-pitched noise and said, "Oh, _Tim_, that's so _sweet_! See! I told you that you two would be a great pair and now you're all worried and everything! Give me half an hour to get to work, and I'll call you back."

"Don't you need the chip's ID number?"

"I made copies of all Jethro's paperwork before I gave them to you. Call you back!" she chirped, and then the phone went dead.

"Of course you did," Tim replied to the nonexistent connection. "You wouldn't be Abby if you hadn't."

He shook his head and retrieved the coffee from the rock wall.

* * *

By the time that dawn made a full appearance, Butch was well and truly away from any sign of civilization – other than the odd candy wrapper or scrap of other trash that the wind had relocated – but he'd managed to find several more tattered pieces of fabric that smelled like the Giver-of-Treats, so he knew he was on the right track.

By the time the sun was high enough that he would have had his daily training run had he still been home, the light breeze had caught a steady trail of _living scent_. He barked a joyous "Yes!" and abandoned the trail, cutting cross-country, his nose in the air, every so often letting out a quick "You there?" bark.

* * *

**A/N2:** Yes, Tim's dog is trying to figure out how to match-make for his human, and yes, I've always thought Tim was a little wilder as a kid than he likes to let on (you can grow up without porn and still have an edgy side – I should know, folks, trust me on this). And before someone asks, the dog was able to track the scent so well because Ziva's bottle of perfume had shattered in the crash – I wasn't able to work that detail into the story in a logical manner, so I thought I'd let y'all know.

I think I may have already mentioned this before, but if not I'll put it here – I don't speak Spanish so if my translations are too off, let me know. I rely heavily on WordMonkey and my vague recollections of high school Spanish classes.

1. ¿Qué es eso? – (Spanish) What is that?  
2. Creo que es un perro. – (Spanish) I think it's a dog.  
3. ¿Qué está haciendo en nuestra leña? – (Spanish) What are you doing in our wood?

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.


	13. Ma'e

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N: **Well… this is it, amigos. Last chapter. Hope y'all enjoy it.

* * *

**Sand, Sun, and Sotol**

_Farewell, good magician. I will _try_ to go home. – Schmendrick, The Last Unicorn_

Liz kept most of her attention on the intimidating mutt that wriggled around Ziva and, of what little remained, the majority of it was focused on making sure that the strengthening sunlight wasn't having too adverse an effect on Áłtsé Hashké. In retrospect, she should have known better.

The prairie dog burrow showed up out of nowhere.

Tony, who was mostly focused on making sure he remained upright and mobile, despite Jethro's attempts to entice Ziva into playing, happened to glance up at just the right moment – he knew a split-second before it happened just what was going on, but he didn't get the chance to even shout a warning.

Ziva didn't realize anything was wrong until she heard Elizabeth make an odd sort of strangled whimpery scream. She exchanged a quick glance with Tony, who simply jerked his chin in Liz's direction and shifted his hold on his crutch. "Stay," Ziva directed the command to Jethro. The dog immediately sat; his still-wagging tail thumping up a minor cloud of dust from the ground.

Ziva rushed the ten yards or so to where Cambry had fallen. As she got closer, she could hear Liz cussing.

* * *

"I don't get it either, Timmy," Abby's voice was only a little hard to hear over the puttering roar of the dirtbike as it idled at the crest of a low rise in the desert terrain. "But Jethro's only about ten miles south of you – almost due south, in fact."

An idea surfaced in Tim's mind as he mentally pictured the spot in relation to where he was now and the location the satellite imagery had indicated his partners' plane had gone down. "Huh…"

"What?"

"Hey, I'll call back in ten minutes, okay, Abs?" Following Gibbs' example, McGee flipped his cell closed without waiting for a response. Exchanging it for the long-range CB each of the search and rescue team had been outfitted with that morning, he called ahead to Lilliana Marcos – the off-duty pediatric surgeon who'd been wearing the teddy-bear scrubs the night before – who was currently searching the grid closest to where Gibbs was hovering in the helicopter.

"Whacha need, chief?"

Tim suppressed a small smirk that formed every time one of the small group of bike-bound searchers called him that. "Keep an eye out for a German shepherd, would you, Marcos? If I'm right, he's probably already found our people."

"You've gotta be kiddin' me," crackled back over the radio set, nearly obscuring Lilliana's 'sure thing'. The new voice was punctuated by a horse-snort. Tim vaguely recognized the voice as belonging to someone by the unlikely-sounding name of Jericho. "You mean ta tell me that dog'uv yours what had ya so worked up this mornin' is beat us to the punch?"

Tim chuckled and nodded, knowing and not caring that the man on the other end of the line couldn't see him. "Pretty sure that's the case. You're in Charlie group, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"Pass a relay along to the boss. Let him know he needs to focus his search about ten or twelve miles east of the crash site."

"Gotcha," Jericho replied before the line was once again filled with silence. Tim turned his gaze to the south, squinting through the bright sunlight even with the protection of extremely dark shades. He glanced down at the fuel gauge and nodded again. Gibbs could yell at him all he wanted – if he even would – but Tim just _knew_ he wasn't in the right place.

He slammed the bike into first and left a plume of dust behind him as he kicked it into second. Had anyone been there – _cough, Tony, cough_ – they would have had a hard time reconciling the manic glee on his face as he pushed the bike up through third gear and into fourth, weaving around cacti and yucca at a near-suicidal speed with a grin totally unrelated to the McGeek who'd spent far more time than was healthy rooted in front of a computer screen.

For all that he'd not been on a bike in nearly fifteen years, there were some things a person just couldn't forget. _Forget the Porche; when we get home, I'm going to trade it in for something a bit more cost efficient. Besides, if I do it right, I'll wind up with enough extra to buy that little Suzuki motocross bike that's been sitting with that for-sale sign on it the last three months. I already know where a couple of trails are._

Yeah, dirt-biking was dusty and dirty and dangerous, but no German-engineered sports-car could really compare with the true freedom of a feeling like flying, the ground only a thick layer of leather and a few inches of thin air away from his heels…

Tim didn't even realize he was laughing.

* * *

"Goddamn mother-fucking son-of-a-bitching giant goddamn ass-licking rats! Overgrown goddamn fuckin' gophers!" and that was all Ziva could really catch before the syllables began morphing into an interesting mix of Mexican slang and what she could only assume was similar epithets in Navajo.

"Lizzie?"

"What?" the brunette snarled, not even getting up from her crumpled position.

"Are you okay?"

"Do I _sound_ oh-fuckin'-kay to you?" Elizabeth punched the ground and took a deep breath. She held it for a count of three before letting it out in a slow exhale. "Felt somethin' go in my leg when I landed. Dunno if it's broke, but wouldn't surprise me none. Just the way this week's been goin', ya know? Do know, though, I ain't about to try an' stand up just yet."

There wasn't much Ziva could say, so she kept quiet and headed back to Tony. She helped him shuffle-hop his way to a cluster of beige boulders that were a few yards from where Lizzie'd fallen. The cluster of rocks were of a size to have almost been planned as seating places, were it not for the improbability of someone having hauled them to the middle of nowhere.

Sidetracked as they were, none of the three really noticed the noise of a helicopter at low altitude five miles behind them, nor of the slightly less-distant roar of a dirtbike approaching from the north.

* * *

Tim's grin didn't falter the slightest as he coaxed the bike up over low rises and around obstacles in his path. It was almost a dance, seeing how close he could skim past a clump of sage or a stand of prickly-pear without actually running over/into them, all the while coaxing the 250cc motor to the upper limits of its comfort-zone.

As the terrain changed subtly, Tim's grin grew broader. He kicked the bike into fifth gear and fed it as much throttle as the bike would give him. He rose up into a slight standing position on the pegs, shifting his weight back, centering most of it over the rear wheel.

Timing it perfectly, he jerked back on the handlebars as the ledge of the gully came up, and for an endless, heart-stopping moment, Tim and the bike were airborne.

And then his brain finally kicked back into 'go' mode. _Nice one, Timothy. Now where are you going to land?_

* * *

Gibbs could see small specks he knew were the scattered members of the search and rescue party from his seat in the small helicopter. He and the pilot had found the arrow in the little valley where nearly no sign of the downed airplane remained, but the universal ground-to-air emergency signal was unmistakable. They had already started moving eastwards, in a slow and methodical zig-zag pattern, hoping to catch up to whoever had made the sign when the relayed message from Tim had filtered through the searchers.

Gibbs had the pilot move a little faster eastwards, trusting that McGee wouldn't send him on a wild goose chase with Tony's and Ziva's lives on the line.

* * *

Liz knew that brand of pain all too well. It was the sharp, stabbing sensation that meant plaster and crutches and six-to-eight weeks of bathing with a garbage bag duct-taped over one limb or another. There was no mistaking it.

Knowing what it was didn't make her feel any better.

About five minutes after landing in the dirt, she finally admitted defeat and called Ziva over to give her a hand in getting to the cluster of boulders where Tony was waiting.

Not three minutes after getting settled on the sun-warmed rock, Tony shifted his gaze from Liz and the tight lines of pain making her eyes crinkle at the sides to Ziva's bandaged arm to his own knee caged in its DIY brace and sighed. "Now what?"

"I don't know, amigo. I'm fresh outta ideas." In fact, Liz had only ever really felt this close to helpless tears of frustration once before – about ten years earlier, right after her first (and only other) unintentional crash.

"I, too," Ziva said, "do not know what to do now. I suppose I could –"

"Wait a sec, do you hear that?" Tony interrupted, using the duct-taped crutch to pull himself vertical.

"Hear _what_, Áłtsé Hashké?" Lizzie's voice was caught somewhere between frustrated and desolate.

"That!" Tony pointed back the way they'd come.

Ziva cocked her head to the side and smiled as the sound reached her.

"What is it? All's I hear's some fucktard out rippin' up the countryside on a crotch-rocket." Elizabeth – not the most patient person to begin with – lost any semblance of the virtue when suffering broken bones without the aid of a decent opiate.

"A _what_?" Ziva couldn't stop herself from asking – the term hadn't been one she'd come across before and the mental images 'crotch-rocket' produced in her mind were slightly more than mildly alarming.

Liz flung her hand northwards. "Off that-a-way. Maybe a mile or two. Fucker on a dirt bike. You think if y'all fire a round or two the idiot'll realize we're here?"

Though Liz's idea had merit, the never got to test it out, as the approaching noise from the helicopter made it something of a moot point.

The fact that the dirtbiker who Liz seemed to hate just on general principle and his somewhat awe-inspiring entrance also arrived moments after the helicopter came within visual range also made the idea unneeded.

* * *

Had Tim realized that his boss would have been watching, he probably still would have taken the jump. He had just enough freewheeling adrenaline coursing through his blood at the time that most of his brain had simply shut down and enjoyed the ride. Until both wheels were in the air and that single flash-point of panicky clarity that an untried jump always and without fail managed to instill in him and suddenly, from Tim's perspective, time simply _stopped_.

The sky was a perfect shade of crystalline blue, a few fluffy popcorn-clouds casting intermittent shadows on the ground. A hawk circled off to the east, about a mile or so north of the line Gibbs had come in the helicopter. And speaking of the helicopter, it hung in the sky like the world's largest dragonfly, sunlight glinting off the bubble-shaped windows and flashing off the rotors as they spun, drawing imperceptibly closer in that moment of _stop_. A sharp spike of joy burbled up out of his chest at the sight of a battered and scruffy Tony leaning on a slightly-less-scruffy Ziva standing huddled together less than a dozen yards off to his right.

And then the magic moment shattered.

Reacting purely on instinct, Tim pulled in the clutch and stomped the bike down to neutral while pulling back on the handlebars and re-centering himself over the rear wheel. He pinpointed where he was going to land and had but a nanosecond to prepare.

The rear wheel connected with the ground, followed by the front, and Tim couldn't help the tiny addition of showmanship to the landing – he pulled the front brake and skidded the bike into a near-perfect circling plume of dust roughly twelve feet from Tony and Ziva.

He could tell that Tony didn't have the slightest clue as to who he was through the helmet.

* * *

The look on Tony's face had been priceless when the dirtbiker had removed his helmet – amusing enough that Liz felt she could forgive the man for tearing up the countryside on the damn thing. Although, looking back on it later, she wasn't so sure it was the look on Áłtsé Hashké's face so much as the morphine that had shown up about half an hour later when Doc Marcos showed up – morphine always did screw with her time-sense.

Now, after three days in Del Sol (one of the better hospitals in El Paso), she was clumping around in a walking boot. She'd wound up with a fractured fibula – the docs in the ER said she'd probably hairlined it during the crash and stepping in the burrow had simply made it worse – but she continued to blame the 'ass-licking giant gophers', much to the amusement of Ziva and Tony.

Ziva's arm would sport a new scar, but the germ-killing properties of the creosote stick which had caused her injury to begin with had ensured that would be the only lingering reminder of their minor misadventure.

Tony was only slightly worse off than Liz – the specialist who'd taken care of making sure his dislocation was appropriately taken care of warned him repeatedly that if he wasn't careful with the injury (for the next six to eight _months_), he'd likely wind up needing a Teflon replacement. Though Ziva had only had to spend one night in the hospital, both Liz and Tony wound up spending a full three nights sharing a room, getting re-hydrated, and having their injuries tended to. Liz probably could have gotten out after the second day, but she knew that if she left, Tony wouldn't really have any reason to stick around and make sure his own injury was on its way to healing.

The day she and Tony were finally released, they were met outside by Ziva, McGee, and Gibbs – to Lizzie's surprise, Ziva and McGee bundled Tony into one car, chattering something about fish tacos – while the older man walked beside her to a parked rental. "Hope you don't mind," he said, "but I told your friend I'd pick you up. Had to come get DiNozzo, after all."

Liz shrugged, "Hell, I don't care none who picked me up, so long as I can get home sometime today."

As Lizzie indicated which turns to take to get them back to her airfield, she studied Gibbs. The same sixth sense that had her recognizing Áłtsé Hashké for what he was and that had alerted her that Ziva was a fellow násgdóítsoh had her realizing that this was someone else who was more than he appeared. (1)

She was trying to figure out if he was a ma'iitsoh or an 'atsá or maybe a ma'e when he interrupted her thoughts. (2)

"This is probably the first time someone's ridden with me and _not_ commented on my driving."

Lizzie chuckled. "Sweetheart, I'm a stunt-pilot by trade. You honestly think you can do better than that with all four wheels on the ground?"

Gibbs echoed her chuckle and took a right turn to bring the rental onto the road that would lead back out to her airfield. "Good point."

The two were silent for another few minutes, and Liz could tell Gibbs was trying to work himself around to saying something. _Ma'e_, she thought. _Only ma'e is so sparing with his words. Well… Né'éshjaa' is quieter, but he doesn't really strike me as an owl._ Had she been given the chance, she likely would have pegged Ducky as an overly-verbose né'éshjaa', if only for the man's unceasing wisdom.

As the rental pulled up to a stop next to her battered pickup truck, still parked outside the hangar of her tiny, neglected air strip, she decided to do what she did best on the ground. "Look, I know you got somethin' on your mind, so do us both a favor an' spit it out already."

"Saw the wreckage. Satellite photos," he started, but stopped before saying anything of any real meaning.

Liz waited. She knew what the man was trying to do, and she further knew it wasn't something he did often. _It'll do him good_.

"Anyone else," he tried again, "and I doubt any of you would've walked away."

Lizzie quirked an eyebrow at him and gathered the bag of clothes she intended to burn and the paper sack from the hospital's pharmacy from the floorboards at her feet.

Gibbs shook his head minutely and shifted his gaze to the diminutive brunette next to him. "Just wanted to say… I owe you one. Anyone else been flying that night, I'd probably be down two agents. Just wanted to say thanks."

Elizabeth grinned. "You're welcome. Any of y'all ever make it down here, gimme a holler. I'll give y'all some tickets to my next show. Really give ya somethin' ta think on then."

The wicked little wiggle of eyebrows she gave to punctuate her last statement had Gibbs returning a smaller version of her smile. "I'll hold you to that," he said as she climbed out of the car.

"Good," Liz replied. "Now, don't you an' Áłtsé Hashké an' Násgdóítsoh an' that kid of y'all's have a bad guy to catch?"

Gibbs chuckled and nodded.

As the rental disappeared into the late-afternoon haze, Liz disappeared into her hangar and set about finding some quality caffeine to get her levels back up to normal.

Finite Incantatum

* * *

**A/N2:** And I've said it before, and I'll likely say it again – yes, I do sorta have a thing for motorcycles.

For those of you who might be interested, Lizzie might be making another appearance in an as-yet-undetailed fic; it won't be a sequel, though, so don't look for her to be running around with the NCIS crew again (at least, not yet) – I've just got a vague idea for her to know the boys from SPN (maybe the versions currently playing in my RFYL 'verse). Anyway, that's still some ways off in the future – up next, I hope to finally finish a few of my WIPs and get those side-stories to RFYL out of my head and into cyberspace where they belong.

1. Násgdóítsoh – puma (Navajo)  
2. Ma'iitsoh – wolf; 'atsá – eagle; ma'e – fox (Navajo)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.

03/16/2010 - Edited to fix a sentence that hadn't originally had its ending.  
04/17/2010 - Re-edited that damn sentence that _still _didn't read right.


End file.
